Earlier this year I wrote an article entitled “Counting the Cost of Discount Travel, My Spirit Airlines Ordeal.” www.tylertxdirectory.com/49266/counting-the-cost-of-discount-travel-my-spirit-airlines-ordeal/ The article documents the horrendous experience I had with the cut- rate airline while traveling with my family to Oregon for vacation. Of course my wife spent a considerable amount of time expressing our thoughts to Spirit’s “customer service” department.
Now generally, I have no compunction about traveling with a low rate carrier. My wife and I are certainly not anywhere near affluent, but we do manage to travel a fair amount, and we do so because we are willing to travel light, sometimes aboard cheap airlines, and occasionally sleep on the airport floor. We’ve flown the likes of Ryan Air (which is the European equivalent of Spirit), and we content ourselves with the drinks and snacks we can bring aboard. Ryan is definitely low budget, but it’s at least professional. My last experience with Spirit was anything but. They are as economical as Ryan but not as efficient.
Following our last excursion to Oregon my wife managed to badger the company into giving us a travel voucher. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted, since we really had no desire to fly Spirit again. And it wasn’t a lot, but we couldn’t raise too much more of a fuss given what we had paid for the tickets in the first place. But now after six months we’re looking for someplace to go to escape the ravages of family discord and spend the Thanksgiving Holiday with more pacifistic influences. So it seems we’re back to those vouchers… Is it worth the frustration of traveling an airline you don’t really trust if the price is right? And how “right” must the price be? Flying Spirit is not unlike flying standby, you may or may not leave when you anticipated, so you keep your schedule flexible. But does the fact that you have the time to plan that way, make the cost of frustration go down?
These are all thoughts I am forced to take into consideration as I look at the possibility of Fall travel. Given the fact that it’s a busy travel season, it remains to be seen whether or not we’ll even find rates cheap enough to justify pulling the trigger on those vouchers. If we ultimately do, here’s to hoping the subsequent story is contains fewer plot points than the last account.