Spirit Drops Short-Lived $5 Booking Fee

For roughly a week, Spirit was charging a $5 “convenience” fee to all bookings except those made at Spirit’s airport locations. It seems the fee wasn’t so convenient after all, at least not for Spirit, because the airline dropped it early on July 22. Finally, some good news!

Apparently the fee was hurting demand for tickets, and considering the policy affected nearly all of its customers, I would imagine the “hurt” was pretty painful. Whatever the case, Spirit gave up an easy $5 on most of its sales, so I imagine the fallout was significant.

Is this a ray of hope for passengers? Possibly—it’s a glimmer at the very least, and a reminder that, to a certain extent, customers wield a fair amount of power over the airlines. Without customers, airlines like Spirit have no business, plain and simple. Sure, we need the airlines so we can travel where we’d like, but it doesn’t mean we have to swallow every new fee the industry tries to feed us. We can speak with our wallets.

So I applaud customers who didn’t accept the $5 fee, and I also applaud Spirit for having the common sense to eliminate its “convenience” charge. Both the airline and its passengers are clearly better off without it.