Alison Sider

Right.

When Spirit was sort of embracing this business model for the first time, people were, like, it was very jarring, you know?

People didn't love it.

But they did love low fares, and people liked cheap travel, and Spirit appealed to customers who maybe weren't deciding between Spirit or Delta.

They were deciding between flying Spirit and not going anywhere at all, or flying Spirit and driving.

So it did bring air travel to a lot of people who might have not otherwise been flying.

It challenged a lot of the big airlines, you know, went head-to-head with them in some of their big hubs.

And the bigger airlines ended up embracing a lot of...

spirits practices.

And there's other airlines that have kind of imitated it, you know, that have adopted the same model.

So, you know, it really changed a lot of things about flying.

I mean, I think we really saw after the pandemic, these budget airlines never really recovered.

So, I mean, Spirit hasn't made money since 2019.

Coming out of the pandemic, people's preferences seem to change.

There was this sort of new enthusiasm for kind of like a more comfortable flying experience.

People during the pandemic had stockpiled like tons of points.

Yeah.

And, you know, we're suddenly we're sort of able to fly maybe extra leg room or even business class or to be in a lounge.

Premium economy.

Yeah.