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Bad Ideas / Spirit Airlines / Carry-on Baggage Fees / Baggage Fees / Checked Baggage / Ben Baldanza / Airline News / Travel News / → All Tags

Bags Not Necessary for Travel, Says Spirit Airlines' CEO

Ben Baldanza: Your new dartboard?

Today, we add another bulletpoint to the timeline of the bad ideas of low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines:

July 2010: CEO Ben Baldanza testifies before Congress that bags are "not essential" for travel. This was part of his explanation for charging for carry-on baggage, as Congress takes Spirit to task for levying hidden fees. Baldanza's actual quote:

Carrying more than one bag is not necessary for all travelers and we believe it is unfair to charge those customers for extra services they do not use—indeed, it is the basis for Spirit's policy to unbundle services not essential to passenger transport."

While this may be true for some, ABC News wisely notes that Spirit still charges to bring that one bag unless it fits underneath the seat, on an airline with the worst leg room in the first place.

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Ben Baldanza / Spirit Airlines / Customer Service / → All Tags

Spirit Airlines CEO Learns The Dangers of 'Reply All'

Everyone who sends email for business oriented purposes has a "reply all" story. 'Reply All' has taken down many a good worker. However, Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza's story just might take the cake.

It all started when a dissatisfied first time Spirit Airlines customer wrote a long complaint to Spirit Airlines outlining a terrible experience on the airline. The customers biggest complaint? Throughout all the delays he endured Spirit was uninformative and downright rude to the couple:

On multiple occasions, we observed your employees talking rudely to customers and just in general, exhibiting extremely poor customer service skills. My husband and I have flown other discount air carriers before and have never had the kind of problems we experienced with Spirit.

While far more egregious transgressions have obviously occurred in the annals of airline customer service, what really caught our attention was Spirit Airlines unintended response:

Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I'm concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He's never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.

Wow. Turns out the customer must be right. That is a downright rude way to respond and shows extremely poor customer service skills. Even though this message was obviously meant to stay in-house, it is time for Baldanza to contact this customer and make things right. In his defense, maybe he was reeling from the fallout of the monkey-snuck-on-plane deal.

Related Stories:
· Spirit Air CEO Learns the Dangers of Hitting Reply All [Consumerist]