Alison Sider

And they didn't want to go back.

And that's not really, you know, Spirit did have the big front seat, which is kind of their answer to that.

And people used to think it was like the best deal on air travel.

But they didn't have like a real answer to premium economy.

Spirit sort of debuted its own offerings, you know, its own kind of answer to the premium travel trends.

In 2022, Frontier had agreed to buy Spirit.

And that was a deal that the leaders of Spirit, and especially Frontier, had wanted to do for many, many years.

So it kind of seemed like this long-desired merger was finally coming to fruition.

And they were going to sort of take on the rest of the travel market and be a lot stronger for it.

So kind of ended up in a back and forth for months of competing offers and competing bids and trying to win over Spirit's investors.

And JetBlue's offer was just a lot higher.

And ultimately that won the investors over and Spirit broke up with Frontier and agreed to be acquired by JetBlue.

The problem was, over the course of that year, when the airlines were waiting for government approval, Spirit's situation was sort of dramatically unraveling.

You know, that all of the trends that we were just talking about that were kind of changing things for budget airlines were starting to come to a head.

And by that point, you know, it's pretty financially weakened financially.

And it had some big looming debt maturities.

And that all comes to a head in the fall of 2024 when Spirit files its first bankruptcy.

Spirit announced it's going to get new capital injected into the business, and it's going to get rid of planes it doesn't need, refocus on sort of its core cities, and it's going to emerge from bankruptcy much smaller, but capable of surviving on its own.

And that was kind of the plan in February and March.

And then the war happened.