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Let's Buy Spirit Air

letsbuyspiritair.com

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Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#501

Post by doctorpangloss »

hattmall wrote: post #115
Nican wrote: post #47

I remember reading about how the major airlines now are more of a "bank that happens to have planes," due to the loyalty programs being worth significantly more than the airline. Delta Air Lines earned $8.2 billion from American Express in 2025, surpassing ticket sales revenue. [1] I primarily use my favorite's airlines credit card because it gives me perks such as priority seating, and free checked bags. I am pretty…

>Delta Air Lines earned $8.2 billion from American Express in 2025, surpassing ticket sales revenue. Just to be clear, that isn't what the article says. It says more than what "most" airlines generate in ticket sales. Not Delta, or any major US carrier. As interesting as that sounds, it couldn't logically make sense and it only represents about 15% of Delta's revenue. It's not even a straightforward revenue stream, i…

Yes, but how does stating the obvious - that airlines make almost all their money from flying planes, and that different lenses of the loyalty program's intrinsic value is accounting parlor tricks, and that the main reason they like the credit cards is because it drives people to fly with their loyal choice more - how does that drive more listeners to your podcast? Checkmate, reasonable guy.

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#502

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #102
gizmo686 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does any of this imply they should become a regulated utility? This seems like a textbook case of the free market pushing prices down to cost. Having alternative revenue streams pushed that minimal price down; but even without that, there is no reason to think the market would have done anything other than push prices to the lowest level possible in that environment as well.

Company makes too much money: "they're extracting monopolist rents! They need to be a regulated utility!" Company makes too little money: "there's no money in this industry! They need to be a regulated utility!"

[deleted]

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#503

Post by pahkah »

foolfoolz wrote: post #474
Brendinooo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullet trains would be good in tighter networks of cities. Southern Cal, Acela corridor. But I'm just not sure the demand would be there for longer distances unless it's so cheap that it's worth the extra time. Like what's China to Kunmung, a 6 hour flight vs a 12 hour train, at a comparable cost?

even SF to LA would have trouble with a high speed rail because the price would likely be the same as a flight

Oh I don't know — I travel the Boston-DC route a lot and fly only because it's significantly cheaper than taking the train. If prices were comparable I would take the train even without it being "high speed", I think there's a market for high speed rail if the prices were as low as flights!

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#504

Post by csallen »

brendanjbond wrote: post #206
csallen wrote: post #204

[flagged]

Care to elaborate with some evidence that this statement is "mindless populist drivel?"

The website tries to paint Spirit as some sort scandal where greedy traders drove it into the ground. Most of Spirit's debt was for financing expensive planes and surviving the pandemic. Literally every airline borrowed to survive the pandemic. Spirit has an ultra thin margin business, trying to compete on price, flying competitive routes, in an industry already known for losing money.

To my knowledge, there was no Wall Street villain here, and the creator of this page just inserted this sentence to arouse populist sentiment, because he/she knows a certain % of the population is primed to unthinkingly accept any narrative that the 1% have ruined something for the 99%.

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#505

Post by alistairSH »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #494
tshaddox wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve flown Spirit and Frontier several times, and Southwest many times (I know they’re not quite in the same category, especially after their recent changes). I genuinely don’t know what you’re referring to regarding the experience being wildly different. Other than a few quirks about what they do and don’t charge for and how they board and assign seats, I feel like there’s almost no meaningful difference between the…

Besides the seats, seat pitch, entertainment, cabin classes, upcharges, boarding staff paid commission to reject carryons, advertising everywhere, the unpolished behavior of other clientele, customer service, and how they handle failure, sure it’s practically the same.

Failure is the one that always puts me off... At least with United, there's a good chance they can get a broken plane running again, or swap in a different airframe, within a reasonable number of hours. For example, my last flight to Puerto Rico was delayed by ~5 hours, due to a nose gear problem. They eventually swapped air frames around, giving us one that was scheduled for the late day flight, and got our air frame fixed in time for that later flight.

Spirit or another super-low-cost? They don't have the extra air frames and number of flights to do that. You get to wait even longer, losing valuable vacation days (or missing work meetings).

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#506

Post by nixon_why69 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #453
nixon_why69 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of roads in the USA are built by private developers, then they're deeded over to the municipality for "free" so its on taxpayers to do maintenance.

And the tax income from sparse, sprawling suburbs, is not enough to cover the cost of providing sewage/electric/gas/garbage collection/firefighting/road maintenance. So either 'wealthy' suburbanites end up being subsidised by taxes from dense 'poor' inner city taxpayers, or the city has to approve a new suburb to get a chunk of income from new house sales and taxpayers to pay for the maintenance of the previous subur…

I'm with you in the first half but not the second half. State governments don't allocate state money to helping suburb/exurb infrastructure unless it's specifically a state road. Never for residential roads. What happens is that maintenance gets deferred indefinitely, it goes to shit because nobody has the money for it, and the homeowners who are affected conclude government doesn't work.

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#507

Post by jjmarr »

xattt wrote: post #475
kelnos wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

United has gotten worse and worse with this. The ads after (not before) the safety video, and also before each movie you watch (and it's usually the same ads before every movie). A few years ago the ads were skippable, but not anymore. The flight attendant also makes an announcement about the United-branded credit cards near the beginning of the flight. But this is really just an illustration of what the top-poster o…

> flying people places doesn't make enough money Does it not make enough money for viability, or does it not make enough money for sociopath types in C-suites? If it’s the latter, there will never be enough money for them and will keep pushing increasingly absurd customer-milking initiatives.

There's not a single major US airline that is profitable on charging passengers for tickets and flying them to destinations.

United is the closest, with only a 0.04¢ loss on every seat mile.[1] the other airlines lose 1-2¢/mile.

The jets are a loss leader for credit cards.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-airlines-lost-money-flyin...

[1] There's two metrics airlines report: Cost per Available Seat Mile and Passenger Revenue per Available Seat Mile.

This is the cost/revenue for flying a seat, which may or may not be occupied by a person, to a destination. If the seat is empty it gets $0 in revenue but still costs money.

You can calculate the profit made from selling tickets per seat mile by PRASM - CASM.

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#508

Post by allanca »

granzymes wrote: post #482
rapatel0 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power companies are the classic example. If power companies were forced to compete, their costs + competition tend to drive them out of business. As a result most power companies are forced to operate in really tight constraints with very limited but predictable margin. I'm not saying that this a better outcome (power companies have their problems too). I was just commenting that this issue parallels the historical s…

Power companies are a classic example of a natural monopoly because they require a ton of extremely expensive physical infrastructure to connect every house to the grid that would be wasteful to duplicate for every competitor. The whole point of airplanes is that they require no physical infrastructure between point A and point B. You can have competing power companies generating the power if the grid is owned by the…

I'm starting to come around to seeing airports the same way. Airplanes need "a ton of extremely expensive physical infrastructure to connect every" city to the grid.

That's why the creditors let Spirit die. Their airport slots and gates are more valuable than the rest of the company combined.

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#509

Post by tonyarkles »

fragmede wrote: post #434
tonyarkles wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really interesting thing, both from an ownership structure perspective and from a "there is nuance in the details" perspective. I did a bit of a deep dive into this a few years ago when there was a local refinery strike. The refinery is a co-op and is also part of a larger co-op system. I'll lay out the specifics here from what I learned. I'm not convinced either way, yet, that it could work for an airline.…

Starting one from scratch, sure, but Spirit already has the airplanes, no?

Has some, yes, although it looks like at least 75% of the fleet is actually leased and not owned. Looking, though, it seems like they currently have an incredibly small market cap of only $7M (with a huge spread), so maybe you could get enough "founding members" together to make a go of it. Buy out the current assets for pennies on the dollars (the leases have value too, but much less than the actual aircraft)

Are you thinking worker co-op or member co-op?

Re: Let's Buy Spirit Air

#510

Post by an0malous »

miki123211 wrote: post #338
rapatel0 wrote: post #48

Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them. Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere Private equity will likely sell the company for parts.…

This is like saying that movie theaters make money on popcorn, so they should just start selling popcorn and exit the movie business entirely. The reason those loyalty programs work is because of the flights. For a much deeper dive on this, see https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/gary-leff-fre... (there's a well-formatted text transcript)

The point still stands that a dependency on creating a profitable airline company is a credit card company
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