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It’s the end of an inexpensive travel era.
Money-savvy travelers are mourning Spirit Airlines, the once-beloved budget carrier, which permanently shut down on Saturday after undergoing severe financial distress and failing to obtain a $500 million bailout from the administration.
After the company’s officials announced yesterday that they were closing operations of the nation’s eighth-largest airline “effective immediately,” hundreds of shocked flyers were left scrambling to rebook flights to their destination, especially since customer service is no longer available.
And it’s costing them a pretty penny and a lot of grief.
Spirit, which has been around for 34 years, plans to refund flyers, but the gesture isn’t enough to reverse the damage already done.
Many stranded flyers took to social media to share their frustrations.
One flyer said she had a flight booked for 9 a.m. on Saturday and found out it was canceled only eight hours prior. “Thank god this time I was a late packer and didn’t get any sleep,” which allowed her to read the doomsday email.
“All Spirit flights are canceled immediately. We are going to give you back refunds but that’s it. We’re not paying for you to go to another airline or anything like that,” she recalled the email saying.
While she found success rebooking with JetBlue, this traveler pointed out that “Some people don’t know their flights are canceled. They’re coming to the airport and they don’t have any flights.”
A commenter on the video highlighted that “…other airlines are taking full advantage of the situation, increasing all their prices” — which is what one vacationing couple experienced when they frantically rebooked after their Spirit flight home from a cruise was canceled.
“We woke up this morning to the news that our flight home tomorrow is canceled because Spirit has gone under,” they said in their TikTok video. “I’m grateful that Chippy and I have the means to be able to book immediate replacement flights, which we did — but they were $900 for two people to fly one way from Miami to Newark,” the couple explained, adding that their rebooked tickets were a “capped $500 price per person by United.”
“What is the rest of the world going to do to scramble for flights to get home?” they asked. “$900 is not a little bit of money for most people.”
Another desperate flyer stranded in NYC “with no money for a flight” posted a video with her Venmo information in the caption, asking strangers to donate so she could rebook a flight home.
One recent video shows a Spirit Airlines victim trying to rebook their canceled flight, which will cost $1,858 for two one-way tickets home.
Another traveler tried to make light of a beyond frustrating situation by posting herself sitting on a rebooked flight with overlay text that read, “You think you can hurt me… I just paid $315 for a last-minute flight back to Vegas from LA because Spirit just shut down,” which in normal circumstances usually range from only $50 to $150+ for a round-trip ticket.
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