Emma Peasley

speaker

194 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 9 May

Emma Peasley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Planet Money · Spirit Airlines and the future of cheap flights · 29 Apr 2026 podcast

Yeah, if you want more puns, check out Greg's newsletter.

Okay, so bailout TBD.

So let's talk about how Spirit went from the fastest growing to near liquidation.

You broke all this down in your newsletter, and you make the point that it's not just Spirit that's struggling.

It's a lot of budget airlines.

Yeah, so we're going to focus on these three factors for how big legacy carriers got their revenge.

So first, they copy Spirit to steal the customers back.

Then they sweeten their loyalty programs to keep the customers.

And then third, the economy sort of does the rest of the work for them.

Budget travelers get pushed out of the market.

So let's start with factor one, this copycat strategy.

Yeah, they kind of take this to the next level, right, when they release this program called Basic Economy, which I book a lot.

Do you wish you'd made other decisions when you booked?

Okay, so cheaper fares, less legroom, character building, more fees.

And now these Spirit customers can basically get the same deals on Legacy Airlines.

So that's factor one.

Next is these loyalty programs.

And this is a pretty big problem for Spirit and other budget airlines, right?

Because they're smaller, it's hard for them to compete with these big loyalty programs.

So first, the legacy carriers lower fares.

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