Spirit is bankrupt, and it has told us that it will redesign its network. The airline is not wasting much time. Last week it announced it would be exiting 12 airports. Ok, it’s exiting 11 it already flew and one that it will never start. Most of these exits were recent experiments that clearly have not worked.
The airline was already barely flying the airplanes it had, and now it’ll need even less aircraft time. Aircraft lessors should get ready for a bumpy bankruptcy.
Regarding this initial move, the airline provided me this statement:
As part of our efforts to transform our business and position Spirit for long-term success, we are adjusting our network to focus on our strongest performing markets. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue service at Albuquerque (ABQ), Birmingham (BHM), Boise (BOI), Chattanooga (CHA), Columbia (CAE), Oakland (OAK), Portland (PDX), Sacramento (SMF), Salt Lake City (SLC), San Diego (SAN) and San Jose (SJC), effective the week of Oct. 2, 2025. Additionally, we are no longer moving forward with plans to launch service at Macon (MCN), which was scheduled to start Oct. 16.
We apologize to our Guests for any inconvenience this may cause and will reach out to those with affected reservations to notify them of their options, including a refund. We are grateful to the airports, business partners and community members in these markets who welcomed and supported us. We remain committed to offering high-value travel options and will continue to serve dozens of destinations throughout the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean.
Well alrighty then. I will have more to say about what’s going on in the western US tomorrow, but I want to focus today on how this is mostly unwinding several initiatives that came about during and after the pandemic. It’s basically a u-turn for the airline, but when it gets back to where it started a few years ago, it might not like what it sees there either.
Cutting the West
Like I said, I will talk more about the western network tomorrow… but it is gone. Some of these cities were served before the pandemic, but Albuquerque, Boise, Salt Lake City, and San Jose were not added until 2022/2023. All of those only had service within the West. They were added to the network as Spirit tried to grow into a new strategy of flying within the region instead of just to/from it.
That is now gone completely, with the exception of a handful of flights from Las Vegas to Southern California and Reno. Everything else that remains in the West will go east of the Rockies.
The Tripod Approach
In 2024/2025, Spirit tried another new strategy. It would go into smaller cities with sub-daily service to three different destinations.
Birmingham (AL) came online in October 2024 with 6x weekly to Fort Lauderdale. In 2025, it added 1x daily to Newark and 2x weekly to Detroit. Detroit was set to end in September, but now the city will be exited entirely in October.
Columbia (SC) started in June 2025 with 4x weekly to Newark, 3x weekly to Fort Lauderdale, and 3x weekly to Orlando. Chattanooga started at the same time with the only difference being 4x weekly to Orlando instead of 3x weekly. These are now both gone.
Funny enough, the only markets like these that remain are those larger markets that started earlier with many more cities.
Since starting in 2023, Spirit has served 10 different destinations from Charleston (SC) at different times. This winter, it will be down to 1x daily from both Fort Lauderdale and Newark along with 4x weekly from Detroit. It’s a similar pattern in Norfolk which had service to 7 destinations. It is now down to Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Detroit.
You can see where this is going. The small cities haven’t been able to even support the tripod, so they’re gone completely. The somewhat larger cities haven’t been able to support a whole lot of destinations, but Spirit is hoping the tripod will work for them.
The Silly Contour Partnership
It wasn’t all that long ago that Spirit announced its latest network plan which was to go into even smaller cities than Chattanooga and Columbia. (I know. I know.) The idea was that it would partner with regional-operator Contour in markets where Contour had service. Contour would not only continue its service, but it would ground-handle Spirit flights and help with local marketing.
This was never going to be a huge for Spirit, but it was a potential way to get a little extra utilization out of the fleet. The first experiment in this plan was to start service to Macon (GA) from Fort Lauderdale twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays.
That was supposed to start this October, but now it’s off. It hasn’t been specifically said that this Contour partnership is dead, but I’m going to guess it is. You just can’t make this work with a fleet of airplanes starting at 180 seats. And even if you could eke out a victory, it would be so small that it wouldn’t matter.
With all of this gone, Spirit is going to try to get back to the basics. The problem is that the basics weren’t working either. Presumably there is a core network that works for Spirit, but I’m guessing there’s more cutting to do before we find that.
