Your Spirit Airlines flight is now on time — almost

The airline that passengers love to hate is figuring out how to arrive on time. Spirit Airlines rose to third place in the DoT’s monthly tally of US airlines’ on-time performance in October, with 87.2% of its flights arriving within 14 minutes of their scheduled time. That placed it ahead of larger Alaska Air Group Inc., which was No. 4. Since punctuality has been a major part of Alaska’s customer appeal, can warmer feelings be far off for Spirit? Overall, the airline industry posted an 84.8 percent on-time rate in October, and 79.7% for the past year. Spirit CEO Bob Fornaro has made schedule reliability a cornerstone of his efforts to revamp operations at the discount carrier, seeing it as a pathway to better service, fewer complaints and more repeat customers. Under Fornaro, who took over in early 2016, Spirit has also deployed a new website, fresh software tools to rebook passengers and a more active social media strategy to engage with customers. While Spirit is making headway, it still hasn’t emerged from the passenger doghouse. It remains the industry-leader in terms of customer complaints, with 3.84 nasty notes per 100,000 passengers, a category for which, in October, the industry average was at 1 per 100,000 passengers. Also, one good month does not a great reputation make. Florida-based Spirit remains tenth in on-time performance over the prior 12 months, with 76.1% of its flights on time by that measure. Hawaiian Holdings and Delta are first and second, respectively, when it comes to on-time performance over the past 12 months. <br/>