Will BRAVO take us to the promised land?
 

Will BRAVO return us to viability? Profitability?

or is this a short term play to get us through h bankruptcy with hopes of enticing a partner?

Every non legacy will see consolidation in the next two years. Will we survive that long is anyone’s guess. Making money in 2027 as spirit is unlikely

This. Inflation has hit spirit and frontier flyers hard and those that aren’t as affected wouldn’t fly on them anyways. There’s about a 100% chance frontier will try to merge.

sorry if I missed a union email, but what is BRAVO? Or are you talking about Johnny Bravo?

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/d...813_ex9902.htm


Spirit airlines plan bravo

Yeah, nothing given to the employees at all, SEC filing

And just my opinion, the union shouldn’t be sending out any company lofty “pie in the sky” changes to save the company. Save that propaganda fantasy land for the investment community.

I don’t mean to turn this into an attack on TC,

but why are they keeping him around? He got a $3.4 million bonus and he did absolutely nothing for the shareholders.

I don’t even care about the employees or the customers because that’s not a company’s main concern.

A company’s main concern is for the shareholders and he has done nothing for them. He’s lost almost all their money. what is the plan?

they’ve gotta have a plan… no Board of Directors in their right mind would keep him around if he did have something up his sleeve.

$4.219m bonus. But who’s counting…

And no, he has lost all of their money. Stock was $26 a share in 2022 when the F9/NK merger was announced, it’s trading .16 OTC currently. So a $50k investment then is worth $307 now. That’s losing all their money.

But I’m glad the big stockholders lost their money on this. They had the solid F9 deal, they wanted to push it for the slightly larger payday of JBLU, know the DOJ had a stiffy for mergers. Look what happened.

What makes you think they would’ve allowed the Frontier merger at the time other than Ted saying so. More money from JetBlue was the better deal. The Frontier would’ve been shot down for the very same reason had the DOJ sued which they would have.

Agree 100%

We will never truly know, but the F9 deal was far from being a lay up with Biden's DOJ. At that point in time I doubt any merger had much of a chance.

And we will never know. I do know I have a better chance bringing home a girl who is a 6 from the bar, versus an 8.

Better deal? Sure. More obstacles as said by almost everyone besides and including Ted, yes. Large shareholders rolled the dice for the larger payday, and it failed and they take the L on this.

The DOJ is a joke, I wanted JBLU over F9, but also believe if it had stayed NK F9, we would have prevailed with the merger, lawsuit or not.

But we will never know.

I personally thought any merger was a lock and the DOJ was just an act and clearly any judge with any kind of sense can see the big three dominance, how they got there, and how they can crush or marginalize any competitors as they see fit. Clearly the merger of smaller players that wouldn’t even come close to the big 4 in size could not be seen as anticompetitive. Of course the last 4 years I’ve been living in bazarro world so what did I expect.

My biggest concern about bravo is this prepackaged chapter 11 is only dealing with a portion of spirits total debt and obligations. NK will still be paying full price for aircraft leases and aircraft debt payments. If the traveling public doesn't buy into the new model quickly why would revenues suddenly be enough to cover operating expenses that haven't changed?

I think it’s about 2 separate issues, but not necessarily exclusive.

The prepackaged chapter 11 was for debt coming due. They don’t not have the money to pay off the billion plus coming due, hence the filing. That was a way to deal with a “tomorrow problem”

Now if the product they produce, Bravo or whatever you want to call it doesn’t resonate and allow profit, then that’s the ball game without a merger. That’s todays problem.

But your correct that while everyone is talking about the Ch11 and the bonds, if they can’t make money on the product they are selling, that’s it.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/d...ex9905_037.jpg

This is the key slide. It shows the pivot from $50-$150 fares to $200-$400 fares.

If you do a little math, they are looking to dump $1 billion in revenue from their current customer base and pick up $1.5 billion from the new upmarket crowd.

Put another way, they're basically looking to totally abandon their current customers and swap for a totally new group of consumers.

The debt service on those bonds was not a small amount of money every month. That’s now half gone. The principle being due in September wasn’t an option. Ain’t got it period.

If they want to start negotiating with everyone else given the demand for aircraft around the world then the airline is done. Leaseholders can make more than we are already paying them so they sure aren’t going to take anything less and would probably be happy to repo their asset and make more on it elsewhere. Majority of the fleet is leased so that alone would kill it. The planes we have debt on same story. Maybe the court could assist in restructuring some of that debt but it would not be significant is my guess. Those banks would also be just fine repoing their asset as well.

We also needed cash according to the bravo plan before profits could be realized and no one was going to give it to us so the bond holders did as part of the deal for their equity.

The brovo plan looks doable if we seriously double down on customer service to change our image and fire all the like minded employees and contractors that can’t crack a smile and like to tell their coworkers to suck a dick on camera in public. The absolute ghetto hiring practices need to change if they want brovo to work.

Most likely this is a stay of execution backed by our largest debt holders until we can make another merger happen so they can cash out.

The Biden administration put a huge delay in this plan with their BS and cost a lot of union jobs in the process. Market disrupters have to have an exit at some point. The entire point of starting a business is to sell it one day. What do they think Spirit exists for?

Yup. The literally have it printed on the slide.

So much for Judge Young’s plan for low fare travel for low fare guests. This one’s for you

I don't see it working....... but time will tell.

I personally don’t see the harm and swapping out the dollar general and Walmart crowd for the target crowd. After all the dollar general crowd isn’t paying the bills. Doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes is how we got here.

Bad analogy; Target badly missed their quarter and their share has actually shifted to Walmart, which has up scaled their products while still keeping prices low. Then there's Amazon and Costco taking share too...
Sorry, I watch too much CNBC...

Im all for it.

But in the end, when our customer service consists of agents beating up passengers in BWI, or fighting with each other in PHL, that won’t work.

Im amazed how we see this on a daily basis yet it manages to elude the C suite team.

The harm is that they are dumping all their current customers and hoping the new ones show up. They only have a few quarters to pull it off before the cash runs out.

In fairness, it usually looks like self defense.

The current type of customer doesn’t pay enough for the business to be viable. They have to switch. The new plan may not work but the old plan definitely doesn’t

In PHL they were scream obscenities at each other in view of the guests.

The entire hood culture has to change. The actual language used, body language, and general decorum must change. We are hiring agents that talk to the guests like it’s someone on their block.

Andrew Yang had it right; we need UBI. Carve out some gib me’s for travel, and we’re a profit generating Tyrannosaurus!

Curious to know why they think they can upmarket without changing seat pitch and seat comfort. Those seem like the starting point.

That’s what the BFS and blocked middle premium seating are in the short term. From what I can tell seat pitch will supposedly change (at least in the premium section) starting in 2025. Along with in seat power? Who knows. I’ve yet to see this management team implement anything effectively. One would think in order to work these cabin configuration changes would need to take place in relatively short order so that higher end customers giving the new product a try wouldn’t get frustrated at an inconsistent product and bail back to the legacies.

Target keeps ****ing off their customer base with wokeness. Last year they lost 10billion in valuation in less than 10 days.

I've noticed business travelers in the last month. Not more than normal or an uptick... But a group of guys in sport coats waiting to board that I've never seen before. And overhead space is running out. So maybe if we ditch the ratchet gate agents in certain cities we might be moving in the right direction. But eff the guy who squeezed millions from this place before the next batch of furloughs and zeroing out everyone's stocks. I just don't see how he's still here. If an ops guy were CEO that would be one thing but he's a bean counter and he sucks at it.

Business travelers need reliability more than anything. Spirit’s lack of frequency between city pairs has always been a pain point.

Yeah the once a day, or only on Tue & Sat model only really works for leisure.

Full or "normal" airline service to a city is at least three daily flights. Maybe two on Tue and Sat.

NK hasn’t done that for a long time. Frequency is still lacking but it’s more like 2-3 times per day in most cases not 1-3 times per week. You’re thinking of F9 and Allegiant. Sounds like they might move back to some of this but I would have to imagine that would be on leisure routes only.

Crowded gate areas, uncouth gate agents and FAs, surrounded by low brow fellow passengers dressed ridiculously and using profanity are all pain points.

I know plenty who won’t fly us purely bc who they are surrounded be on the plane. People who have no idea how to act

Which is why you’ll never see business travel on us.

Simply, the he clientele Spirit is seeking won’t fly Spirit because its Spirit.

Spirit needs a new name, period. The name Spirit is always the punchline, right before the drum fill “ba dum dum”. Pinnacle Airlines changed their name to Endeavor after emerging from Chapter 11. Spirit needs to do the same. Sadly, we don’t even have the cash to slap a new name on a plane.

If an airline pilot who’s in touch with the industry can’t figure that out you can bet a passenger can’t. The airline just needs to go away, one way or another.

Carl Icahn will be glad to come in and save ya 😂 .

On average, I don’t notice a huge difference between AA and Spirit clientele. The only outlier is that there’s significantly more children on a leash at Spirit gates.

Dude, I've been saying this for (what feels like) years now. And you're the very first person to mention it on this entire forum; Spirit has got to ditch the name. I tried to warn Ted about this during the pandemic, but him and Bendo wouldn't listen. Cashing in on the brand name by saving money on customer service reps, will always be a negative ROI. Rolling meltdowns, fights breaking out, FAs sleeping on airplanes and general operational issues has led to passengers not willing to wager more on a Spirit ticket than they would at a roulette table. Which is why Ted always says "we're just not seeing the price resiliency we are hoping for." Ditch the name and rebrand, or spend a pile of money on showing the general public they won't be stranded for days at an unfamiliar airport. You hit the nail on the head Cinco.

Sincerely, Ted's Beard

Well you have seen both operations, so there is validity in what you say. Sure seems like Spirit passengers will run it up the "ghetto scale" pretty fast once things go bad.