[tshaddox]

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 these and legacy carriers like United and American. I honestly don’t even feel like the prices are consistently that different.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

The two main differences are more armchair lawyering required to avoid fees (legacy carrier is often not going to put your bag in the dimension bin, but the Spirits and Frontiers of the world certainly will) and having to sit through three sales pitches instead of one on the legacy airlines. I think Delta is the only legacy carrier in the States that doesn't do obnoxious sales pitches - only the food cart upsell. Ryanair will come through with their hands out minimally three times since last time I rode them (though it's been several years, is it four now?)

One other difference I can think of is that carry-ons are more rarely included in the base fare in the budget airlines than the legacy airlines, though maybe that has also gone away since the changes where bags must be included in the listed price that Southwest pushed for.

[thrownthatway]

> having to sit through three sales pitches instead of one

I’m not from the US and have never flown any of the airlines being discussed here.

I’ve never heard of this, is there some YouTube videos you can point me to.

[miki123211]

Ryanair (EU) also does this, but the US is indeed pretty obnoxious here.

United even has commercials before the safety video; combined with the "if you're watching explicit content on this flight, please mind the children" announcement, those flights onestly honestly felt pretty surreal to me.

[kelnos]

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 of this thread said: flying people places doesn't make enough money, so they have to pursue other revenue streams.

[jmspring]

Look at prices (which are much higher than when I booked my trip later this summer), United prices are insane compared to others. Their prices were 4x what I paid for on SAS. I've long had a united club card, but likely circulating that out in the next year. Their prices for service/availability isn't worth whatever crack smoking is going into their pricing.

[boppo1]

Can't they just raise prices?

[pibaker]

People keep asking airlines to raise price for better service and then every time they travel they hop on a price comparison website to find the ticket with the lowest sticker price, punishing companies for actually raising prices.

[cozzyd]

The annoying thing is... I already have a United card :) (and being able to board early and bring a normal size carry-on on basic economy is one of the best perks).

[xattt]

> 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.

[jjmarr]

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.

[Symbiote]

I can't find videos.

The cabin crew stand at the front of the plane, and either play a recording or make an announcement saying you can buy a lottery scratchcard for €2 or whatever, with some of the money going to charity. They then walk down the plane "scratchards? scratchcards?"

They repeat this with a collection for charity (no scratchcard), a promoted drink, and some sort of food.

I think this is mostly unique to Ryanair (in Europe), I don't remember Wizz Air, Norwegian or EasyJet doing this. Part of Ryanair's marketing is to make the experience worse than it needs to be, so you know you're saving money.

[RugnirViking]

ive never experienced that on ryanair? I fly it pretty regularly, its just the food cart, and even that feels halfhearted, I see maybe 3% of customers actually getting something, so most of the time they dont even bother asking, just roll right on by unless you go out of your way to ask for something.

The only bad upsell they do is in the booking process. Are you sure you don't want a hire car?

[Symbiote]

They state they sell scratchcards on their own website: https://corporate.ryanair.com/about-us/giving-back/

If you search "Ryanair scratchcards" you'll see recent news articles about them.

I've used Ryanair once in the previous 5 years, so my experience might be out of date. There was a time my job was taking me to "holiday" destinations for meetings, back then I used Ryanair more often as they often had the only direct route. Maybe the scratchcard sales are more common on those flights.

[RugnirViking]

googling it it seems like its still a thing. I reckon it must be on certain specific flights, maybe ones that are likely to attract a certain crowd, liverpool to malaga sort of flights maybe. Ive definitely not heard about it, but I do usually fly the same routes so

[rob74]

Yes, Ryanair is the undisputed leader in finding new creative ways to take advantage of their captive audience and saving a few pennies here and there (e.g. I'm not aware of other low-cost carriers that have advertising on the overhead bins or put the safety instructions on seat-back stickers because it's marginally cheaper than using cards for that). Not to mention only flying from airports in the middle of nowhere to save airport fees.

...while other low-cost carriers try to distinguish themselves by not being quite as bad as Ryanair.

[virgilp]

I kinda' like Ryanair as lowcost airline? They're fairly efficient (boarding, serving etc), they _actually fly_ the advertised flights (with relatively few exceptions), and the food is reasonably priced. During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet". Sure they have their quirks but they don't seem to go out of their way to deceive you, they're pretty open about what you pay and what you get.

Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.

I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.

[notahacker]

> During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet"

Generally I agree with your view that Ryanair is decent at what it does, but COVID refunds happened only after the regulator stepped in to threaten them over their original "no refunds" and then "refund in the form of a voucher, with a short expiry date on it" policies actually being unlawful, and even allowing for the scale of its operations it received more complaints to the UK CAA than anyone else about refund handling during COVID.

[reillyse]

Ryanair have been regulated into compliance very effectively by the European authorities- everyone knows they are scumbags and make sure they don’t get away with nonsense.

Literally how regulators should work. They look at the outrageous things they try to do and make laws to prevent them. It’s worked very well and also hasn’t ended Ryanair (which is the usual anti regulation argument , that we can’t have cheap things with regulations).

I personally never fly Ryanair because I’ve had to sue them (and won) in the past, they really do suck.

[FridayoLeary]

I actually like wizz. They are dirt cheap which is the only thing i care about. The ground crew don't openly despise you, unlike easyjet, they tolerate you and their cabins are all right. Just they don't have any customer service if anything goes wrong.

"Wizz; Not the worst airline you've ever flown on"

[extraduder_ire]

The safety card thing, and lack of seatback pockets is mainly to speed up turnaround after everyone's off the plane. (planes only make money when they're in the air)

After they made this change years ago, they said so explicitly in their marketing around continuous improvement.

[roryirvine]

They don't have to actually sell a single scratchcard for it to be worthwhile for them - the whole point is to cheapen the experience.

They have an entire theory of marketing based on people believing that "if it feels cheap, it is cheap", and so they deliberately build in a bunch of annoyances (scratchcards, arbitrary baggage restrictions, checkout hoop-jumping, endless PR about removing toilets or running standing-only flights) which serve to make their service seem as cheap and nasty as possible.

And it works: some people simply ignore the nasty aspects, others are willing to put up with them in order to get a bargain, and yet others actually take pride in wading through the crap - usually expressing it in "I beat the system" terms. And here we are talking about it on a barely-related thread - carrying their marketing message further!

[abustamam]

It's kinda refreshing to see a company sell the illusion of bargain bin instead of selling the illusion of luxury like many other companies!

[thrownthatway]

Haha what! That’s wild.

[altairprime]

Sounds like all US airlines, honestly. No shame, no pushback, just endless pressure to spend.

[tshaddox]

I haven’t actively surveyed all the airlines, but I happened to notice recently that United charges for carry-ons.

[dghlsakjg]

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.

[alistairSH]

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).

[hn_throwaway_99]

I feel like you're living in a different universe then. I will literally never fly Spirit (well, neither will anyone else) nor Frontier ever, I loath the experiences I've had on them so much.

First, as someone with relatively long thighs, I literally don't fit in their sardine can seats. But more relevant to most people, while things may be OK if everything goes perfectly and nothing is delayed or cancelled, you are completely SOL with Spirit/Frontier if something goes wrong (and "something" may just be they themselves decide to cancel an undersold flight at the last minute). It's nearly impossible to get someone to talk to, I feel like the employees know how shitty their companies are so they all have an attitude like they DGAF, and it's a mad (expensive) scramble to find alternative arrangements at the last minute.

I've never had as abysmal experiences as I've had on Frontier compared to any other airline.

[eru]

From a customers' immediate point of view, this sucks for you.

But it's great they are not regulated utilities. Because either everyone would have to pay for extra legroom, even if they don't need it, or some freakishly long people would not be able to pay for the extra legroom that they need.

[twiss]

Why do you think being regulated utilities would preclude having multiple classes of service? Airlines had first class before deregulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_class_(aviation)#History

[kelnos]

That's not how regulation works. Or at least not how it has to work.

I don't pay a flat fee for my water, electricity, or gas usage, regardless of how much I use. I pay for the gallons, kWh, and therms I actually use. (Yes, there are other fees on those bills, but my usage actually matters.)

Airline regulation doesn't have to specify standardized seat pitch, etc.

[eru]

Sure, there's probably some utopian nirvana regulation that gives you exactly what you need.

In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.

[dghlsakjg]

Airline regulation as common carriers is not a hypothetical. We used to do it, and none of the things you describe were an issue

[eru]

In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.

[vineyardmike]

Ah yes, because I am also forced to buy the same amount of electricity and water from my regulated utility regardless of need.

[tshaddox]

I’m relatively tall and have a generally rough (but tolerable) time with all domestic bottom-tier seats.

I have no difficulty believing you when it comes to customer service. I’ve never had any issues requiring anything beyond the most basic customer service, so I just haven’t been exposed to differences between airlines in that regard. I also understand that a bad experience can leave an exceptionally bad impression. I suppose the only thing that might surprise me is if the higher-cost airlines don’t also have terrible service.

[SmellTheGlove]

Yup, came here to say this. Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline. There's slight variation in terms of whether you get a whole can of coke for free or not. If you're taller than me, the 28" of seat pitch vs say 31" on delta may make a difference, but I'm only 5'9".

I still avoided them like the plague because the legacy carriers are selling you operational performance and the ability to usually get you where you're going within a reasonable timeframe if you're delayed or canceled. Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, whoever else, do not do nearly as good a job when something goes wrong. Although they should get a lot of credit - none of them have ever had a fatal crash.

[fragmede]

> Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline.

Yes, if you ignore the part where things are different, it's basically the same. Trouble is, those differences do meaningfully make a difference. There's no objective measure for misery and happiness, but flying Jsx is nicer than Spirit. You can put a dollar value on misery, that's why one's so much more expensive than the other.

[jmspring]

My parent "airports" are Bellingham and SeaTac. I hate SeaTac with all my soul. Next admission - primary carrier is Alaska. They are mediocre to ok. Cabin crew, always friendly. I've had random flight cancellations - some seatac/bellingham, others randomly before/after homeland security budget BS. In all cases, they rebooked on something ridiculous (a day or two later, hours that made no sense) and their call hold times (or call backs) are hours. Sadly, I'm in a captive market and am very proactive when day of travel is around.

[kakacik]

Sounds like you guys need some very basic regulations we have here in Europe - companies have to take care of folks, provide food, accommodation and replacement flights (and up to 600 euro in case of overbooking depending on distance). Not great, but worries like above are simply not on our calendar when traveling, low cost or not.

Also, here in Europe, traditional aircraft carriers have been migrating their quality towards bottom end (ie Swiss not giving any beers for free even on intercontinental flights, microscopic legroom also on intercontinental) while for example Easyjet is for me at this point a high quality reliable carrier with no bullshit. Ryanair is a dumpste3r but luckily they don't serve my nearest airport well.