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A business travel specialist discovered aviation's new frontier in a five-day, eight-airline, first-person trial in May 2004 to judge the service and value of America's low cost airlines, and his tips are still worthwhile.

Not too long ago, a Corporate Travel Director and I discussed the phenomenon of Low Cost Airlines (LCA’s) that have sprung up over the last 15 years. According to Fortune magazine, at the end of 2004 there are 10: Air Tran, Alaska Airlines, America West, American Trans Air, Frontier, Jet Blue, SONG, Spirit, Southwest and TED.

Of those ten, I had only flown on Jet Blue, which isn’t really indicative of all of them; Jet Blue offers 24 channels of video at your seat, snacks, and all-new (purchased within the past four years) Airbus A320s, along with a Transcon/Northeast-Florida route structure. Kennedy Airport is their major hub.

As to the others, as travel professionals, we all book them in some fashion. I had indicated that it might be prudent and interesting to sample a majority of the others to see if all the gossip was true (“the seats are falling apart, flight attendants are rude, everyone of these is akin to riding the Lexington Avenue line in rush hour”) or not. It was a rather unique set of flights, which will be discussed here. For whatever reason, I could not fit Alaska Airlines into this trip; maybe the next time.

MAIDEN FLIGHT; SPIRIT FLIGHT #706 LGA—DETROIT(L.C. Smith Terminal)

11 May 2004
As I started the journey, there was much trepidation—people had been booked on Spirit before and they seemed all right with it. But, I thought, check-in would be at least an hour, the staff rude and unpleasant, the departure gate at LaGuardia cramped, crowded and unmanageable, and my airliner filled with rude people, littered with the detritus of a long torment

Guess what? Everything worked. Almost perfectly.

The oldest (1987) aircraft that I flew for the nine trips had a pleasant, newish blue interior, with flight attendants both young and older. The passengers consisted mostly of leisure travelers and families, with just a fewal “suits” to balance out the load. The MD87 had a somewhat balky air conditioning system that did not work too well on that hot May afternoon on the ground, but performed well at altitude. The cuisine? The almost ubiquitous pretzels. One thing about the LCA’s food -- if available, it must be paid for (except for Frontier) and, sometimes, you have to bring your own.

Arrival in Detroit on the 1-hour-20-minute flight was an astonishing 25 minutes -- early. Spirit, along with most of the other Detroit Airline Community does not use the new MacNamara Terminal, but the stuck-in-the-60’s L.C. Smith Terminal which, while clean, seemed to be the least pleasant. I do remember being in that same terminal 35 years ago, and it looks like nothing had changed. However, unpleasant surprises like this were the exception for the five days.