With airlines, you tend to get what you pay for.
When people book tickets, even in coach, on American, United or Delta Air Lines, they expect a certain standard. It's not that they're looking for the swanky perks of business or first class, but the seats are padded, nonalcoholic-beverage service is included, and some decent snacks might be served.
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That's admittedly a low bar, but the no-frills airlines, Spirit (SAVE) -) and Frontier, literally make their seats less comfortable to save on fuel. Cushioned seats make planes heavier, so the two big discount airlines go with molded plastic reminiscent of kindergarten chairs.
Beverages, of course, cost extra on Spirit and Frontier as does pretty much everything. That's the business model for those carriers, so consumers generally go in with very low expectations.
Those expectations likely extend to Frontier and Spirit's ability to get you where you're going on time. In theory, any passenger should expect that basic metric from every airline, but regular Spirit and Frontier Airline (ULCC) -) customers know that's simply not the case.
Major airlines including Delta, United and American have agents at their gates well before flights board. Spirit and Frontier often do not, bringing over personnel right before boarding begins.
That makes it unsurprising that both Spirit and Frontier rank toward the bottom of the list on Cirium's 2023 on-time performance list.
What should actually surprise you is that Southwest and JetBlue Airlines also rank poorly on that annual data-based list.
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Southwest and JetBlue are late a lot
Delta tops the Cirium list with 84.72% of its flights making on-time arrivals. Three other airlines, Alaska, American and United, all have better than 80% on-time-arrival records.
Southwest Airlines comes in well below the top four at 76.26% while JetBlue falls well below industry standards at 68.33%. That puts Southwest ahead of Spirit (71.16%) and Frontier (68.33%) while JetBlue falls below the two heavily discounted carriers.
And while its numbers fall below the full-fare airlines, Southwest's performance may come with a bit of a built-in excuse.
"Southwest always lags in on-time performance, but they also schedule to turn planes a little faster than rivals. They don’t start boarding until 30 minutes prior to departure, versus 35 and even 40 minutes for competitors," View From the Wing's Gary Leff reported.
JetBlue is merging with Spirit Airlines
JetBlue and Sprit agreed to a $3.8 billion merger back in July 2022.
"We look forward to welcoming Spirit’s outstanding Team Members to JetBlue and together creating a customer-centric, fifth-largest carrier in the United States," JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said when the deal was announced. "Spirit and JetBlue will continue to advance our shared goal of disrupting the industry to bring down fares from the Big Four airlines."
Currently, the merger is awaiting approval from a U.S. federal court, which has signaled it might allow the deal if the combined company sheds certain assets.
Leff does not believe the deal should be approved, for an entirely different reason. He says JetBlue should get its own house in order before taking on another airline that has its own problems getting passengers where they're supposed to go on time.
"On the ground they’re a mess across the board," he wrote. "They should be focused on operating reliably rather than acquiring and then merging Spirit into their operation.
"If anything, based on the data, Spirit should merge them into theirs! Spirit has really improved its operations a lot compared to where they were 7 and 8 years ago."
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