Even if you hate Spirit Airlines, their shutdown has negatively affected the US airline industry

I am one of the people that hated Spirit Airlines. They were meant to be an airline brand of the future, but I guess that "future" meant being constantly frustrated and having people on the flight frequently fight with other passengers and the staff.

They had a reputation pretty quickly for being an airline where customers are definitely going to lose their shit and shout at someone and much of this had to do with what I considered to be really terrible business practices of nickel and diming their customers around every corner under the auspices of very low cost airfare.

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I only flew with Spirit one time, that was enough for me. The attitude of everyone involved in that flying process was really tense and the way in which they were going to find a way to charge you 10-100 dollars extra before getting you on the plane made that tension even worse.

I didn't like it when airlines started cutting their up-front costs and then simply moving them to inside the terminal and inside the plane where you no longer have a choice but to be fair to Spirit, nobody fucked around with the carry-on baggage allowance with these guys because pinching you for exceeding your baggage allowance was exactly what they were there for.

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The thing with Spirit Airlines that was actually beneficial to the airline market as a whole, particularly in USA, was that they would be so much lower cost than other competing airlines that it drove the prices of all the other airlines down because otherwise their results wouldn't even appear on the pages of Trip.com, Skyscanner, Kayak, whatever it might be. Other airlines that were a lot better than Spirit had to reduce their prices as well and this worked out wonderfully for me as the low-cost no-frills nature of Spirit wasn't something I was going to endure, but I was inadvertently receiving some benefit from.

When they shut down as a company earlier this year I was not at all bothered by this. I was never going to use them, but then as time went by I started to notice the adverse effect that their absence from that market was causing.

I do not trust airlines or even governments when it comes to their claims of increased costs of jet fuel. I'm not claiming to know the ins and outs of that industry, but it does seem kind of manipulable. Any time the airlines see a political reason they can blame things on in order to charge more for something that has kind of become a staple, they are going to take that and you would too if you had a business.

The cost of domestic flights in the United States has risen nearly 30% and of course, they all blame it on anything other than wanting additional profits. On routes that were previously covered by Spirit airlines, these rates jumped nearly 40%.

I'm sure they all have wonderful accountants that can make their books look like they are all losing money but if that were the case, why is it that there are new airlines popping up year after year? Why would anyone join an industry with such incredible startup costs and such volatility? My suspicion is because they are lying to us and they know as long as they all work together to some degree, they can charge us whatever they want. What are you going to do huh? you just going to not fly? At least in USA, that is really your only choice since our train travel system absolutely SUCKS.

Sometimes I think a "bad guy" is necessary in an industry to keep everyone as honest as possible and in this case, I feel as though Spirit Airlines was one of those things that kept prices low. In their absence it seems as though domestic flights are more expensive every time that I look at it and no, I don't buy the whole conflict in the middle-east bullcrap as a reason. That's an excuse to make profits and you can hide those profits with creative accounting.

This is all just my opinion of course, there's probably some geo-political experts out there that would call me naive for having this opinion. I believe that having as much competition as possible is good for the consumers and the elimination of the lowest cost competitor is what has resulted in the rise in prices. Maybe it was done on purpose as well.