PG: I’ll be devil’s advocate here, I came through one of your gateways and I saw a lot of people who were angry, right. And yet, your plane was full. So something’s not computing.

BB: Why were they angry? Do you know why they were angry?

PG: Because it was crowded. Because the seats didn’t recline,

BB: And yet they were on the plane. Because they save money. And if you look at the total price people s– pay on Spirit, the fare they pay, plus the extras that they may choose to buy like baggage or seat assignment or something to eat or drink on the plane, the total price they pay is, in almost all cases, less than their next best option on another airline.

People like to save money. And there’s a big segment of the population that sees travel essentially as a commodity. They don’t want to be on the airplane, on anybody’s airplane. They want to be where they’re going.

PG: They’re not on the plane for the experience. Yet, all those other airlines, what do they market? …The experience.

BB: That’s exactly right. And that may work for some of them. But it’s not what we are. And when you market to the experience, you’re fighting for a small segment of the traveling public.

Our view is let’s build an airline for the 99 percent, not for the 1 percent.  And that’s what Spirit is.

PG: Think about marketing of an airline in the last 30 years…It’s rich Corinthian leather, a
wine list. Onboard food, everything short of a flight attendant singing Broadway show tunes on board.

BB: At Spirit, we say it’s the lowest price. It’s $49 to New York. It’s $9 to Bogotá, Colombia,

Every year, a large number of our customers pay less than $10 for their ticket.

The point is, we don’t market product being on-time, friendly, safe, things like that. We market price. But, you know, our planes are new. Our flight attendants– are great. They provide great service. Our planes are new. We fly generally on time.

We have customers who fly us for a very low price into the Caribbean then stay at the Four Seasons or stay at the Ritz-Carlton. Because when they’re on the island, they’re on vacation. When they’re on the airplane, they’re getting to the vacation. They have a different mindset about what value is.

We had– there was an experience on a flighta a coupla years ago where a woman on the plane who looked at the flight attendant and says, “What’s the movie on this flight?” And the flight attendant looked at her and says, “Honey, you’re havin’ a Delta moment.

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