So much to unpack here.

The class action plaintiffs were those who bought tickets on third party travel site which did not disclose the ancillary fees. While there may be a case to be made there is shared culpability with those travel site, a settlement often proves less costly in the long run vs. the exposure to punitive damages or other liability.

Biden called out “junk fees” in his address and has called on the house to create legislation against them to protect the consumer, yet his DOJ is working to block a merger which would eliminate most of these fees in the new larger JetBlue. As stated before, nearly half of Spirit revenue is based on these fees, so if the prosecutor is arguing the merger would deny consumers access to a cheaper ticket, but the same government would also seek to stifle the ULCC model, Spirit would be forced to raise ticket prices to match the B6 pricing model anyway, and lose the economy of scale from the merger. You can’t have it both ways.

Neither Spirit nor Frontier could continue to operate with a 40% loss in revenue, and the only way to continue to provide an ultra low cost price to consumers would be some form of subsidies. Let’s use tax payer money to lower the cost of tickets for those same taxpayers, yeah doesn’t make sense to me either.