Yeah…the experience certainly isn’t great. But the price is unbeatable for penny-pinching Columbia students.

I’ll paint you a picture. I was in the depths of midterm stress, you see. It’s second semester first year, and the burnout was hitting. So, curious, I look it up—flights to my hometown.

And it was only $51 dollars. That’s nine round trip rides on the subway, six HeyTea drinks, or three gyudon rice bowls from Cafe East. No matter how you spin it, that’s pretty cheap.

Unfortunately, with said midterms, I couldn’t actually take that flight. But the idea of it was tantalizing.

I’m not going to get all dreamy here. I know I’m going to get, quite frankly, a terrible experience on board. The thinnest seat known to man, leg cramps from the absolute minimum amount of legroom possible, and I’m not even going to get the complimentary apple juice and granola bars that American gives me. But I’m not expecting that—the flight’s basically $50, and it’s freaking Spirit. An expectation like that is taking LitHum and thinking, “I’ll definitely be able to manage this amount of reading.” But for a two-hour flight—plus the quintessential Spirit delays—I can suck it up.

Did Spirit cancel my flight back home once? Yes. Was I pissed? Yeah…but I was in Los Angeles, my state was wrapped up in a ferocious snowstorm, and this was December of 2022—that’s the time with the scheduling crisis that Southwest got absolutely flamed for. So we found the Spirit version of a hotel, stayed there for a couple days, and instead of studying for the ACT at home (where it was too cold to even go outside to grocery shop), I got to do it outside on the pool deck. Spirit kind of saved me a little there.

And then, the next year—on my way back from looking at Columbia, actually!—United canceled my flight back for virtually no reason, and that airline is considered dependable. So, in my humble opinion, Spirit didn’t actually screw up that much.

Plus, Spirit’s never had a fatal accident due to a flight. I’m not going to argue that much for this point: Spirit simply doesn’t offer as many flights as other airlines like Delta and Southwest. We’re getting a smaller sample size, sure, but we can still appreciate that fact.

Spirit will never completely have me wrapped around their finger. At the time of my college application process, only Spirit had direct flights between me and California, and that’s why I eliminated numerous West Coast schools. I don’t love Spirit. I probably don’t even like it. At the very least, I just don’t hate it. But for the price, we as Columbia students just need to really just have to take a step back to appreciate them for being so incredibly dirt cheap.

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