Spirit Airlines launches flights to 7 cities from RDU, and its CEO expects more to follow
A Spirit Airlines flight from Baltimore landed at Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Thursday morning, then returned to Baltimore with the airline’s first paying customers from RDU.
Spirit’s bright yellow planes will be a familiar sight at RDU, where the airline now offers daily nonstops to seven destinations: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and New Orleans.
Spirit becomes the fifth low-cost airline to fly from RDU, after Allegiant, JetBlue, Southwest and Frontier, which added nonstops to eight more destinations from RDU this week. Like Frontier and Allegiant, Spirit focuses on leisure travelers, offering low fares that require passengers to pay extra for things such as checked bags and drinks on the plane.
RDU became the 72nd destination for Spirit, which only recently came to North Carolina. The airline began service to Asheville and the Triad last September and recently announced it would offer nonstops to four destinations from Charlotte starting in June.
Spirit’s president and CEO Ted Christie was in town for the launch at RDU. In an interview, Christie said given the Triangle’s growth he expects the airline will eventually add more flights, though it’s too early to say when and to where. The following are edited excerpts from that interview:
Q: You’ve describe this as a growth market. What took you so long to get here?
A: Well, to be honest, the airport’s been a little constrained. It’s always been on the list. ... It’s been about making sure we were aligned with the airport and finding the right gate. ... The good thing about working at a company like ours is that most if not all metropolitan areas want to have a low-cost carrier in their mix and one that can produce more traffic. The good news for us is that the demand is very high, and we want to make sure that we’re getting into the right places at the right time. ... We believe there’s a growth opportunity here to continue to expand beyond just the routes announced today.
Q: How did you pick these routes to start with?
A: Well, we focus on our strengths. And when you look at these routes, as a predominantly leisure carrier, the first things that usually jump off the page are going to be Florida. And we’re obviously headquartered in South Florida, and that’s our single largest base, is Fort Lauderdale International Airport, and we do very well in and out of Florida. ... And then when you look at some of the other metropolitan areas we view them as sort of a mix of leisure and origin traffic. You look at big cities where people live, and they are the ones that want to go to the leisure destinations. We obviously need to be on both ends of the travel spectrum.
Q: Do you see us as a leisure destination?
A: Well, Raleigh-Durham straddles the line, to be honest. Clearly there’s a growth opportunity here, with a lot of people moving in. I met with your airport director this morning, and he said net employment increases 100 per day. So it’s definitely a growth market. That creates that origin opportunity where people live and work in Raleigh and they want to travel on vacation and go to New Orleans and South Florida and Orlando. But at the same time, the Carolinas are a leisure destination. We fly to Asheville, that’s a leisure destination. And we believe Raleigh-Durham is a leisure destination at some times of year. With the large focus you have on higher education here with a number of large colleges, that drives a lot of that as well — people coming in to visit their children, people here for graduation, that sort of thing.
Q: Who is your competition here and how do you distinguish yourselves from them?
A: I’ll start with what I truly believe our real competition is. I think the uniqueness of being the lowest-fare operator in any market is really that your challenge is how can you convince people to spend their discretionary dollars on travel rather than something else. You’re competitor is that decision point — am I going to go to Orlando for the weekend and take the kids to Disney or should I instead buy that new TV or take the family out for a nice dinner? That’s the buying decision, and believe it or not that ends up being the competition for the lowest-fare carrier. We’re convincing people to spend their discretionary dollars on travel rather than something else.
What’s beautiful about that model is that you take this aspirational luxury good of travel, the idea of seeing new places and visiting friends and relatives, and you can deliver it to a much wider population. ... There are obviously other airlines that are trying to do the same thing. And we embrace that competition because we believe we do this better than anybody else. We believe our cost structure is the lowest in the industry, and that’s how we deliver low fares.
Q: You got some good publicity last fall when you were tops in the industry in on-time performance. How important are those rankings?
A: Well, I think it’s pretty important. Delivering a low-cost product when it’s delivered either inefficiently or incorrectly can be perceived as cheap. That’s why I use the word “value” so regularly, because I think that’s the difference. When you can deliver a low-cost product and do it with consistency, that drives the feeling of value in the buyer’s mind. We’ll never be a consistent No. 1 performer probably in, let’s say, on-time performance because we don’t believe that that’s the best application of our product in the market that we serve. But we want to be amongst the best, and when you couple that with the lowest fares in the industry, that’s where we get our true value.
Q: One area where you’ve still had some trouble is consumer complaints. You still rank pretty poorly in that area [Of the 17 U.S. carriers tracked by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Spirit had more complaints per passenger than all but two in February, the most recent data available.] What’s the trouble there?
A: It is true, although we’ve made tremendous progress. In the last year and a half, I think our complaints are down 70 percent. ... Some of that is legacy brand holdover from when the airline was still trying to figure its way. I think of our business as going through evolution. And Spirit was really at the forefront of changing this generation’s airline business into what you see today, which is a much more a la carte, much more democratic travel experience. And in doing so we pursued that relentlessly and maybe the operational results weren’t catching up as quickly as they needed to and that created some friction. But we’re working our way out of that, and I expect that the improvement that you see in customer complaint ratio will also continue to improve. We measure our guest satisfaction our own ways, and those metrics also are on a dramatic improvement.
