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Ben Baldanza, Who Brought No-Frills Flying to Spirit Airlines, Dies at 62
He introduced ticket prices that couldn’t be beat, but asked fliers to pay extra for nearly everything, including water, carry-ons and printed tickets.
Ben Baldanza, who turned a small, money-losing airline called Spirit into a profit-making powerhouse through a combination of ultralow prices, bare-bones service, outrageous marketing and a no-apologies approach to customer complaints, died on Nov. 5 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 62.
Scott McCartney, his co-host on the podcast “Airlines Confidential,” confirmed the death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Spirit was already a low-cost airline when Mr. Baldanza arrived in 2005, serving first as chief operating officer and then, a year later, becoming chief executive. The airline had lost $79 million the year before, and Mr. Baldanza, an industry veteran with a reputation for finding clever ways to cut costs, was given carte blanche to slash away.
Rather than trim at the edges, he took a radical approach: what he called the “bare fare.”
Passengers would pay a basic price for the flight and then shell out for virtually everything else, from printed boarding passes ($10) to water bottles ($3) and carry-on bags ($35 if the tag was printed at home, $50 at the airport).
On board, they found no business class, no back-of-the-seat movie screens and no Wi-Fi; the seats didn’t recline and legroom was minimal. To bring in more money, seemingly every square inch of space was available for advertising, including the flight attendants’ aprons and the airsickness bags.
Mr. Baldanza, an eager, media-friendly evangelist for his airline, touted the resulting ultralow fares, which averaged just $75 in 2013, down from an already low $94 in 2008. He called Spirit a “dollar store in the sky” and its aircraft “buses with wings,” and made no apologies for meager service or miserly fees.
