I started out my journey to Vegas on a nice Saturday evening, my mom agreed to watch the twins so my husband could take me to the airport and not just drop me at the curb but actually walk in with me and wait with me for a few minutes. I only travel by plane a few times a year generally on United, Frontier, Southwest, a big airline everyones heard of. This trip was planned with Spirit. Let me just say, I'm not one to generally complain about much or have a bad opinion about anything, I'm definately an optimist most of the time.
This is the WORST airline I've ever traveled with!
Not sure how it happens that you travel from say Tampa to Las Vegas with a stop (not chaging planes) in Atlanta in your bag is lost for 24 hours. How does that happen? Clearly they removed my bag from the plane by mistake but seriously that's what you do, handle travel and luggage. This seems like something really simple, the bag with the "THRU" tag continues on that same plane. This wasn't even where my sour experience started, let me back up a bit. My husband and I arrive at the airport ticket counter to find a line of at least 50 people waiting, not to print their boarding passes, because a flight was canceled, nothing like that. Just to drop off their checked bags. Boarding passes already printed, luckage already paid for and tagged and yet the line was really, really long. We waited and waited, about 40 minutes in this line to drop off my 1 bag that I paid $42 online, crazy expensive for checked bag by the way. Once I got my bad dropped off and continued on my husband went on his way home and left me to visit TSA and board the plane or so I thought.
I continued on taking the monarail over to airside A, on my way an employee of the airport asked which airline I was flying. I guess I looked lost or flustered. I mentioned I was flyer Sprit and she contined asking if I flew with them before and how I liked them. I told her I had not and she mentioned that the airport and TSA gets a lot of complants about them and how they treat customers. Great, just great, I'm flying a horibile airline, we shall see how this goes...
If you've never been to the Tampa airport, TSA is super easy maybe one of the smoothest processes in the country. I was through there in no time, grabbed a bottle of water from the newsstand and proceeded to the gate. By this point I still had about an hour until my flight but there were hundreds of people in the area of gate A16 just hanging out. Looking at the monitors I noticed nearly every Spirit flight was delayed including mine. It's going to be a long night, I'd better grab a coffee. So I hit Starbucks, found some floor space since all the chairs were taken and called my husband to give him an update. Apparently bad weather in Altanta was delaying a lot of air travel into Florida and my flight ended up leave 2 hours later than originally scheduled. During the crew instructions the flightcrew were cracking jokes but not the usually light humor you may expect more of in relation to everyone flying on Sprit being "CHEAP" and that they nickle and dime their customers. One flight attendant even said something to the effect of if the life vests are needed please insert your credit card into the side of your seat to pay and release your life vest. This just seemed in bad taste to me.
Like I mentioned there was a brief stop in Atlanta before my flight continued on to Las Vegas. The brief stop should have been about 30 minutes which turned into 90. For what reason, who knows. The gate in Atlanta, like Tampa, was very crowded with people waiting everyone for this flight to Vegas as well as a few others that were running late. When I finally arrived in Vegas at 1:30 am (was scheduled to arrive at 10pm) I was exausted and just wanted to grab my bag and head to the hotel. Little did I know my bag was not in Vegas with me. It arrived on the 10pm flight the next day... bring on a bit of shopping just to get by. I travel a bit from time to time and this was by far my worse travel experience ever and I will think twice before booking with Spirit Airlines.
