Only three months ago, Frontier Airlines started offering flights from Columbia, MO, to Orlando, so of course travelers began booking tickets for trips to Disney World and other area attractions. Now Frontier is pulling the plug on the route, leaving customers to scramble for new travel plans.

After May 13, the airline will no longer make the Columbia/Orlando jaunts. Rather than book other air travel options for customers with tickets after this date, Frontier is simply providing full refunds. The airline says the airfare for this route is significantly lower than other airlines so it can’t justify the extra expense of re-booking customers on other carriers.

As you can imagine, this is not sitting well with a number of people.

The Frontier Facebook page is filling up with unhappy comments like this one from a customer who had built her family’s entire Disney vacation around the Frontier airfare:

“[W]e even sprung for a more expensive resort since we saved so much on the airline tickets. We told our son about the trip and he was extremely excited. Then at 10 pm on Sunday night, nearly 2 months after booking our plane tickets, we were informed by a friend via text message that Frontier had cancelled all flights from COU to MCO after 5-13-13. We were scheduled to fly out 5-15-13… [A Frontier rep] said she could help us book a new flight from KC or St. Louis, but it would cost an additional $300+ per person. Needless to say an additional $900 for plane tickets is not in the vacation budget. I absolutely cannot break my son’s heart and cancel the trip altogether, so our only option at this point is to drive. I have spent the last several days on the phone with Disney travel representatives trying to reschedule our stay. Because we are driving, we were forced to move our departure date up so we can leave on a weekend to avoid having to take more days off work than originally scheduled. We are extremely dissatisfied with your business practices and customer service and not only will Frontier NEVER receive business from our family again, we will tell everyone we know about our terrible experience with Frontier.”

“The animals on the tail seem to be smarter than some of the marketing people at Frontier,” one public relations consultant tells the Denver Post about Frontier’s PR mess. “It shows that Frontier is doing a miserable job of taking care of the people who actually have chosen Frontier for a trip… Frontier wants to be perceived as a good, efficient airline, but this simply puts more doubts in everybody’s minds.”

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.