Tranquility

Cursory look at the Q2 earnings reports and Spirit still has one of the lowest fixed costs in the industry. Granted, it's not nearly as low as we were pre-Covid, but it's still damn low. This is mainly a revenue problem, not entirely a cost problem.

Q2 Adjusted CASM-ex:

AAL- 13.14
ALK- 9.89
DAL- 13.14
F9- 6.24
JBLU- 10.24
NK- 7.36
SWA- 11.57
UAL- 12.1
(Disclaimer, I'm coming off a red-eye so these #'s may not be 100% accurate...)

CincoDeMayo

Low costs are great. But we have none of the revenue streams the legacy airlines have to offset CASM. So we have to charge more to make up for it, and there are the legacy carriers offering a comparable price with a better product.

unfortunately the rebrand needed to happen 2 years and 2 billion dollars ago. Regardless of the “JBLU said we couldn’t” excuse, that will be what sinks us; That and management never bothering to acknowledge dirty planes, crap customer service and questionable reliability won’t win repeat or new business.

Sadly I think best case for us is for private equity to come in and finance because we are so cheap to acquire. F9 posted a baby profit, factor in higher hourly labor rates and they wouldn’t have made money. The model is dead, merging two ULCC airlines is like merging Travel agency 1 with Travel agency 2.

FriendlyPilot

That would be LAS-EWR most likely. United has 7 daily flights and Spirit has 2. United's flights are generally full on that route. I'm sure Spirit's are as well.

I just checked fares Monday (tomorrow) from Vegas to EWR. Spirit is selling seats for $214, but I can buy a basic economy ticket on United for $159. United is $55 cheaper. Economy plus is $400 and First is $1,000. NK doesn't offer a comparable product, so United effectively has a monopoly on that higher revenue, which means they can offer basic economy at a discount, even below Spirit. United has 112 First class seats daily between LAS and EWR daily plus another 378 Economy plus seats. That's almost 500 Premium seats a day. This is where all the money is being made by United.

Even Southwest is going to offer a broad selection of premium seats.

NK has to find a way to get more revenue out of each flight because lowering costs isn't going to move the needle fast enough and isn't sustainable when competitors can just lower fares as well.

VacancyBid

IDK how meaningful a CASM comparison is between airlines that have coach only narrowbodies to those with first, layflat, widebodies, etc. Comparing apples to apples, Spririt is still 18% higher than their only peer competitor.

CincoDeMayo

Because they make 18% less than we do. If only pilots worked for free, imagine how low we could get the CASM🙄

Noisecanceller

It matters because that’s the competition and who is putting us out of business, not frontier.

CatPilot1

https://www.travelandtourworld.com/n...-need-to-know/

Halon1211

Spirit airlines/southwest merger announcement probably coming in the next three months

SPA ALPA is usually pretty keen on what’s coming up and check out their latest email of our merger assessment. They get the feeling as well that something is coming up.

sinsilvia666

Looks like we just hired Daniel Camjo at f9 from you guys. They say he is joining the f9 legal team on the 12th.

"he will be responsible for legal oversight of all major contractual agreements across the organization, as well as providing legal guidance for the company"

wonder if that's just for our contract talks or a merger setup?

SSlow

APC's top notch team of financial analysts would disagree with you