Spirit Airlines touts its operational improvement, but its overall performance remains lacklustre

Spirit Airlines' top priorities for 2016 are: improving its dismal operations after regularly underperforming the industry, and engendering a more positive relationship with its customers. The results so far are relative. Its on-time performance and customer complaint ratios have improved, yet Spirit's ranking remains near the bottom among airlines whose operational metrics are tracked by the US government. Nevertheless, Spirit is pleased with its progress so far.

Spirit acknowledges its operational performance will never rise to the level of some of the top performers in the US; but it believes that the progress it has made during the country's busy summer high season will continue into autumn 2016, and the improvement will bolster its ULCC model over the long term.

Spirit's unit revenue performance during the past year has shown that the ULCC model is not immune from the industry yield pressure that has stubbornly hovered over the US domestic revenue environment during that time. While the market place does remain competitive, Spirit is starting to see encouraging signs of capacity restraint among higher-cost airlines.