Spirit Airlines Knows Everyone Hates It, Really Doesn't Care

Just in the last week or so, Spirit Airlines has made a lot of people mad, what with denying a veteran dying of cancer a refund and then announcing it’ll charge $100 for some carry-on bags. But perhaps unsurprisingly, Spirit doesn’t really give a flying fig if you don’t like it or if it’s got a high number of customer complaints. It’s all about the money, see.

When told that Spirit has the highest number of customer complaints, CEO Ben Baldanza said, according to FoxNews.com, “That’s an irrelevant statistic.”

Irrelevant, eh? According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Spirit totted up 8.27 complaints per 100,000 passengers in January. Coming in a distant second was United at 3.5 complaints per 100,000. Southwest seemed to please people, with 0.2 complaints per 100,000 fliers.

Again, those numbers do nothing to faze Baldanza — and he’s not afraid to say how much he just doesn’t care.

“If you ran a restaurant, and out of every 100,000 customers, 8 of them said they didn’t like your menu, would you change your restaurant?” he asked. “Why don’t we interpret that 99.92 of all customers have no complaints? Because that is what it says.”

Kate Hanni, executive director of Flyers Rights, a nonprofit consumer organization that represents U.S. airline passengers, agrees that Spirit isn’t in the practice of caring about passengers view of it.

“They’re the worst airline in the U.S.,” Hanni told FoxNews.com. “They put no money back into customer service, which is a black hole at Spirit.”

She says her organization probably gets around five times the amount of complaints pertaining to Spirit than any other domestic airline. We’ve seen our share of complaints against Spirit, as well, so that’s not too shocking.

“Spirit Airlines has a history of cruelty toward their passengers, but they continue to treat them like meat in a seat because their fares are so low they are confident people will continue to fly with them,” she continued. “But the fact is people are damaged by Spirit every day and Spirit Airlines just has a culture of ‘I don’t care.’ “

Spirit Airlines’ boss calls complaints ‘irrelevant,’ says dying veteran should have bought insurance [FoxNews.com]

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