BEWARE!

In the past, one of our favorite airlines to utilize for travel within the United States was Spirit Airlines. Their prices were always competitive, they offer assigned seating and when our itinerary suddenly changed a couple years ago, they offered a $20 coupon, which could be used towards a future flight. This company was doing everything it could to satisfy a customer. Well, until this week that is, when Snoopy and I were introduced to the NEW Spirit Airlines.

Back in May we booked a round-trip flight with the OLD Spirit Airlines. As we diligently submitted our preferred travel dates on their web site, there was absolutely no mention of any future "extra" charges.

This week we received an email "welcoming" us to the NEW Spirit Airlines. They explained THEIR excitement of offering customers a method to pay for their checked baggage online. What!?! Pay for what baggage and exactly who is suppose to be excited? Initially, it appeared this "great new service" was to take effect in a month or so. What? And lose all that extra revenue? NO, the NEW Spirit decided to make this retroactive to December 2006. Basically, anyone purchasing a ticket after this date would be charged $5 extra for each checked bag. Why is Spirit excited? Simply, if you didn't take advantage of this NEW online feature and pay $5 per checked luggage, the baggage charge would increase to $10 if done at the airport!

Well, there must be some sort of mistake, right? Let's call "customer service" and voice our opinion on how unfair we think this is. So, after talking to the first representative and getting nowhere, we asked to speak to a supervisor who defended the company's NEW policy and refused to "make the customer happy". This is even after explaining that these tickets were purchased in May 2007 and their NEW policy wouldn't formally be in effect until June 20, 2007. Unfortunately, our plea for reasoning fell on deaf ears. The extra money the NEW Spirit could realize, by making these charges retroactive, was just too great to ignore. Oh yeah, and what about customer service? Well, we'll let you decide!