You might not want to fly Spirit Airlines, but you probably wish you owned its stock this year.
The 48-year-old unwinds by running or playing one of his 15 guitars. (“It’s a bit of a disease,” he said of his collection.) He stands 6’2″, and said he regularly flies in its planes’ 28-inch pitch seats comfortably and argues that legroom is an outdated concept because seats are slimmer than they used to be and offer more space.
“The messaging is all around about being a high-quality low-fare airline,” said Christie.
And Spirit has been improving.
This past October, Spirit vaulted to the top of the Department of Transportation’s on-time arrival rankings of major U.S. airlines for the first time. Its flights were on time 81 percent of the time in the first 10 months of the year, the fourth best, up from dead last in the year-earlier period.
Customer complaints remain higher than its competitors but have declined in the past few years. The Transportation Department logged 2.46 complaints against Spirit in October for 100,000 enplaned passengers, well above the average of 0.88. But that compares with 3.64 complaints for 100,000 travelers in October 2017, and close to half the rate posted in the same month in 2016.
The airline last year enrolled its customer-facing employees in Walt Disney‘s leadership and professional training subsidiary, the Disney Institute, to try to improve its interaction with Spirit travelers.
“Before, price was the product,” said Savanthi Syth, an airline equities analyst at Raymond James. “Price is still important but also the reliability is important. They’ll never be high-touch like Delta, but just the basics, making sure you get that.”
Spirit flew nearly 24 million passengers last year, a more than 13 percent increase from 2016, making it the eighth biggest in the U.S., according to the Transportation Department. The airline is adding capacity more than three times as fast as other airlines. Christie wants to increase its service between the U.S. and Latin America. On Thursday, the company said
When asked whether he would consider merging with another carrier, Christie said he’s focused on running the airline but added that “you can never rule out any option.”
Spirit’s stock rally isn’t over, according to some analyst estimates. After Spirit in late November nearly doubled its fourth-quarter revenue forecast to growth of 11 percent, several analysts raised their estimates for its stock price and the airline blew through some of those targets. Helane Becker, airline analyst at Cowen & Co. called a target price of $60 after Spirit’s improved estimates, up from $55 in October. The stock was trading midday Thursday down 3.6 percent at $55.66. Jamie Baker, an airline analyst at J.P. Morgan upgraded the company’s stock to outperform with at target price of $82, close to its all-time high of $84.87 it hit in December 2014.
Analysts polled by Refinitiv expect the airline to grow earnings next year by 35 percent.
Spirit is heavily reliant on ancillary revenue, fees for services that often come for free with standard coach tickets on other other airlines. In the last quarter it collected close to $55 in non-fare revenue from passengers and $57 per passenger in airfare.
Its model of a low, stripped-down airfare and fees for nearly everything else, which many travelers bristled at years ago, is now more common on big carriers, like Delta, United and American, who have each launched no-frills basic economy fares in recent years.
Christie wants to get more passengers to pay up for these services. The airline recently rejiggered its website and app, adding reminders to travelers about the chance to select other services or upgrade to a “Big Front Seat,” one of its seats at the front of the plane that has six inches more legroom than the standard seats.
There could be challenges ahead. Concerns about a potential economic slowdown roiled markets in December and some airline executives are starting to play defense. Delta earlier this month told investors it was prepared for a weaker economy because its revenue streams are more diverse than they had been in the past, to include income from credit card deals.
Christie said he expects the airline is on solid footing because its customers are mostly vacationers, not business travelers, which tend to ebb and flow more with economic cycles, adding that since the last one “it has been a while, thankfully.”
Source:CNBC
