You'll get your seat assignment when you check in. My recommendation is check in online the day before. Paying for seat assignments is a waste in my opinion. Spirit and Frontier will almost place people together 99% of the time if you check in early enough. Just dont wait until the last minute to check in. My recommendation is check in as soon as possible (you can check in 24 hours before the flight) and then print off your tickets. Prepay your bag(s) well in advance to get the lowest rate on bags. You can just go to the bag drop off line and be done. The seats on Spirit are definitely smaller and the leg room is also limited. Also its cheaper to pay for a check in versus a carry on. As I mentioned, pay for it early (and online). Dont pay at the airport or the day before. They raise the price of bags as you get closer to the flight date.
Really really bad. WE had a morning flight at 7:10. Flight took off at 7:00. Then they gave us a flight for night time same day for 7:00. Delayed until 9, then 10, then 12, then they cancelled the flight.
it's a short trip, fitting all my crap into a backpack confused as hell. flight took off 10 minutes early?
The night flights seem to be the worse with timing. Someone explained this to me once, but it's 3rd party info, to take it for what it's worth. I was told Spirit has fewer planes in its fleet and they don't go back and forth from the same two cities. It's like they start on one coast in the morning and then head to other, and if a plane breaks down or has trouble, there's no backup. So delays pile up until the end of the day, and that's when it sucks the most. I have never had that bad luck myself, but personally know of 2 other people who have had separate night flights delayed by over 3 hours.
Its true. Spirit aims for maximum utilization of its planes because their logic is that every minute spent on the ground is a minute not making money on the plane. So naturally delays will pile up and many times they just run out of pilots towards the end of the day. Pilot hours are regulated by the FAA so if the pilot coming is out of hours and its late, they may not be able to find a pilot with available hours to fly the next flight. This to me is the big downside of Spirit. As you get later in the day, you risk large delays and even cancellations. And unlike other carriers, Spirit wont rebook you onto another airline. You either get on the next available Spirit flight or a refund.
Yeah, Spirit will do that. Our departing flight to Oakland pushed back like 15 minutes before departure time. If reliability is important to you, don't book Spirit.
