Originally Posted by
Hedley
Prior to the pandemic they were much more focused on high fare business travel than leisure travel, especially low priced travel. When the business travel didn't come back they adapted and began going after every dollar available. Now they offer a price focused option that also comes with a much larger network, historically better customer service, better rewards programs, frequency, WiFi and in seat entertainment.
The LCC's in general start small and fly from periphery cities and markets to avoid direct competition with the established carriers. They have new/cheap labor forces and very low costs.
Then the LCC will start to mature so it will order bigger/larger planes on an attempt to spread out rising costs across more available seats. It'll have trouble operating from the periphery with such big planes so it will migrate towards the cities and markets of the legacy carriers.
Legacy carriers will not just take a new entrant standing still, so they will match capacity and even fly markets at a loss to limit the influx of the LCC into the main city markets. Both will lose money on a market, but the legacies will make it up in other places.
LCC will now decide it needs to be more like a legacy carrier instead of an LCC to compete. This is where we are at now. In a way, all of the LCC's in the US have followed this general path. Some are just more further along than others. Breeze is at the beginning and Spirit has run the course.
JBLU is the only new carrier that has began as a direct competitor to the majors right in JFK and other major cities. They began with a nicer product and didn't just compete on low price model initially.