The End of an Era: Spirit Airlines Is Done . . . But Some Random Guy Is Trying to Buy It?
Wise Brothers—-Chattanooga, TN
The End of an Era: Spirit Airlines Is Done . . . But Some Random Guy Is Trying to Buy It?
Spirit Airlines abruptly shut down on Saturday, stranding everyone who had tickets, and without any customer service to help them figure out what to do.
In a statement, they said, “We’re not able to help rebook your flight, but we’ll automatically process refunds for [all] flights. We are proud of the impact of our ultra-low-cost model for the last 33 years, and had hoped to serve our guests for many years to come.”
It wasn’t shocking. Spirit has been struggling for years . . . going through two bankruptcies . . . and failed mergers. And there’s been a lot of noise in the past few weeks about surging fuel costs being the nail in Spirit’s coffin.
Spirit was a popular punching bag . . . and a lot of those jabs were deserved. But just last month, it topped a list of America’s Best Airlines, and it was one of the few budget options when you just needed to get from Point A to Point B.
Here are two fun Spirit-related stories:
1. Some random guy online started a crowdfunding campaign to buy Spirit Airlines. He posted a video and said, “I had a genius idea, there’s over 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the U.S. . . .
“If we took the average fare of a Spirit Airlines flight, which is around $30 to $40, we could buy Spirit Airlines.” (And there’s more.)
It seems like it was tongue in cheek at first, but he’s raised more than $88 MILLION in pledges. That’s probably not enough. But the guy seems to think there’s a possibility for an airline owned by us, THE PEOPLE. (For more, hit up LetsBuySpiritAir.com.)
2. This is very cool. A Spirit pilot named Jon Jackson was supposed to have his final, “retirement flight” on Saturday . . . but the airline shut down hours before . . . meaning he missed it by one day.
So he flew back home on Southwest . . . as a passenger . . . with his son. It could’ve been anticlimactic . . . but Southwest caught wind of it, and they set it up so that he had a mini-retirement party with THEIR staff at the arrival gate.
They hollered for a speech, and Jon said, “Very overwhelming. I can’t thank you all enough. As Spirit goes down, this is a sad day, and you guys made it incredible. Thank you so much.” (Here’s video.)
Courtesy of CNN
