Guess who flew Spirit! (SJC-BWI in the Big Front Seat)

We’re skipping ahead a few months in time now after my June Europe trip to August.  July’s flights were uneventful (and mostly on Alaska Airlines).  My first interesting flight is certainly an odd one for this blog: I flew from San Jose to Baltimore, MD on… Spirit Airlines.  I was specifically going to Baltimore, so flying directly into/out of Baltimore airport made sense.  And so that’s what I did.  Southwest also offered a flight from Oakland to Baltimore at the time (which is now just seasonal). 

The Spirit Airlines flight appealed to me for several reasons: (1) I had never flown Spirit, (2) they offer a “first class” product: the Big Front Seat, and (3) it was really cheap.  I’m not going to bury the lede on this one: the flight by itself with no add-ons was $73.99. 

Now, the cheap price I was able to get during the summer travel season also indicated that the route was not doing well, and so the facts that Spirit Airlines is in bankruptcy proceedings and this route has now been canceled are not surprising. 

I started my journey at San Jose by checking out “The Club SJC”.  There are actually two of these at SJC airport, both in the A gates at A8 and A15.  When I last flew out of SJC back in 2022, I visited the other one.  This club (the A8 one) was very close to the Spirit Airlines gate, and it sounded like they got a lot of Spirit Airlines customers.  I’m not sure how to interpret that.

The inside of the club is materially similar to the other Club SJC, with some basic seat and dining areas.

This club also had a printed out menu, instead of just on QR codes.  The menu is basically the same as in 2022.  It’s such a short menu that the print used was huge so that it’d fill up the whole page.

I ordered a slider and a tikka masala rice bowl, as well as a mimosa.

I was served a rice bowl and meatballs.  I don’t eat beef or green onions, so yeah that’s unfortunate. 

No matter.  I just put in another order which did eventually come.  Since this lounge is not operated by an airline, you could also pay to get access to it if you didn’t already have the appropriate credit card.  That actually fits in with the pay-as-you-go theme of Spirit and this review as a whole.

The lounge was truly nothing special, so I made my way over to the gate a few minutes before boarding.  As anyone who has seen a Spirit aircraft knows already, the plane was extremely yellow.

We had been warned in advance that the flight was going to be delayed because the aircraft was delayed taking off from Baltimore, but then the actual deplaning/cleaning/boarding process added to the delays.  But that’s what one expected with Spirit these days. 

I had purchased a carry-on bag ($35), so I was given group 1 boarding.  I wasn’t sure what the boarding situation was going to be, and even when I got there, I still was unsure what was going on, so I just got in a line that looked like it was associated with group 1.

There were a lot of pre-boarding families with small children, which makes a lot of sense to me.  Families that need a lot of seats are a lot more price sensitive than business travelers.

I entered the aircraft and stored my bag above me immediately because my seat was my classic 1C. 

I had purchased a Big Front Seat for $50.  I purchased this flight before Spirit announced that they were going to add a proper premium class with their Big Front Seats; however, I also flew it before the enhanced service aspects came into effect.  At the time, the Big Front Seats normally cost $100+ on this route, but I actually booked my ticket on the day of the big Crowdstrike outage.  After systems started coming back online, I guess prices were reset to their default values or something because I was able to get the base ticket for $40 less and the BFS for $60 less, so I ended up saving about $100 (the cost of a carry-on bag did not change).  So that was pretty lucky for me right then.

Shortly after takeoff, the in-flight service began.  Because of the change to the how the Big Front Seat works since I flew it, my experience is no longer the norm.  Spirit’s menu offering at the time of posting is here.  But at the time, all snacks and drinks were simply available for purchase.  I would’ve happily ordered something on this nearly 5-hour flight, but the only food offerings were snacks (e.g. things like popcorn, chips, or pretzels) and they no longer offered the buzz ball premixed drinks. 

The good news though is that they now once again offer mixed drinks in the form of buzz boxes.  However, their meal offering is still limited to snacks.  The flight was long enough that they had enough time to do the inflight service 3 times.  They started shortly after takeoff and then between each service, they took a 30-45 minute break in the galleys.  That’s more service than I usually get in economy class, so I thought that was pretty good.

However, the only other picture I have to offer is the obligatory selfie:

Since (at the time), this seat was not considered a separate class of service, this is the best economy seat I’ve ever had on a low-cost carrier (and second only to a United 767 service I had from LAX to DC where I had a Premium Economy seat).  The inflight entertainment was simply the option to pay for WiFi (either basic or steaming).  I had attempted to buy streaming WiFi when I booked the ticket, but the website hadn’t fully recovered, and so glitched out when I tried to buy it and then got stuck in a loop of saying that I had bought the WiFi but hadn’t paid for it, so I couldn’t access the voucher code nor could I purchase a new one.  Luckily I wasn’t charged, but I just gave up.

The Big Front Seats are also interesting because they, like all the other seats on board, don’t recline.  That being said, I think that’s for the best because no one ever encroaches on your space.  And the seats aren’t too awkwardly upright (which is not always the case).

In summary, I was actually really excited to fly this flight, and I was not disappointed at all because Spirit is very upfront about what it offers. And what it offers is a pay-as-you-go experience that you could call a (mostly) “fully customizable” experience.  Giving out scores for this flight is, perhaps, not fair because it’s a low cost airline, but here we go.  The ground experience was totally fine with The Club at SJC (3/5). In the context of “extra legroom” economy class seating, especially on a budget carrier, this seat gets a 5/5.  The service was fine for what it was (4/5).  The food was pretty bad though, with only unhealthy snacks available (2/5).  And finally, having the option to pay for WiFi that includes streaming is totally reasonable to me for this type of airline (3/5).  Overall, the flight got a 17/25, which is pretty average. 

I paid just $159 all-in for this 5-hour transcontinental flight.  At that price, I don’t have a lot of room to complain because the equivalent flight on United or Alaska in just regular coach cost at least $100 more.  Even the $110 regular price for the Big Front Seat is cheaper than United wants for its Economy Plus seats on flights between SFO and DC.  I paid for the flight on my Amex Platinum and earned 5X points/$, which seems funny to me for some reason, but Spirit is just as much an airline as any other.  I also earned 1 357 ‘Free Spirit’ miles.  I earned 337 miles from the base fare ($56.39 * 6 miles/$) and 1 020 miles from the add-ons ($85 * 12 miles/$).  It’s wild to see the add-ons earn more miles/$ than the base fare, but it really goes to show you that the add-ons are where Spirit makes all its profit.  If I ever use the Free Spirit miles for anything, I’ll come back and update this paragraph with a valuation for the miles.

You know I might even do a post on the Free Spirit credit cards.