'They're for real now': Spirit Airlines grows from a laughing stock to a formidable competitor

It wasn’t so long ago that Spirit Airlines launching new service in a city would be met with a collective shrug or howls of laughter. Pundits and late-night talk show hosts made a habit of poking fun at the airline. Its customer service and on-time performance ranged from bad to abysmal. If Spirit showed up on any of the myriad lists that rank airline quality, it was probably dead last. The funny thing is, passengers kept coming back. The airline was making money and growing. All the while, it was adding modern, more fuel-efficient aircraft to its fleet. Its workers were being trained (or retrained) to be customer-centric. These days, about the only thing Spirit shares with its past is its name and its ultra-low- fare business model. "Today's Spirit is not the Spirit that five years ago was the butt of industry and consumer jokes," said Robert Mann, president of airline analysis and consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co. "They're for real now." Company leadership has "done a great job of fixing it, getting it back to being consumer-oriented and getting it efficient again," Mann said.<br/>