Frontier Airlines, thwarted by JetBlue in its ambition to buy Spirit Airlines and create a huge coast-to-coast ultra-low-cost airline, isn’t sitting still, according to its CEO Barry Biffle, who was recently interviewed by The Points Guy.
Biffle indicated that the loss to JetBlue might have as many benefits as downsides, since it leaves Frontier in a position to sell itself as the dominant ULCC once Spirit becomes part of JetBlue’s not-so-ultra low-cost structure, assuming the merger gets federal approval. “95% of the capacity in the United States will be 30% to 80% higher cost than us. So we kind of have no natural competitor at that point,” he said.
Frontier’s bid for Spirit, like JetBlue’s, was primarily about speeding up growth at a time when the market has recovered to pre-pandemic levels and appears to be headed for more growth at the same time that supply chain issues have resulted in slow deliveries of new planes. Spirit, JetBlue and Frontier are all primarily Airbus A320 family users, and acquiring Spirit was a chance to acquire a large fleet quickly.
Still, according to Biffle, Frontier has room to expand, and possibly into unexpected markets, including Europe and South America. “Europe, Hawaii and South America, we’re evaluating them,” Biffle said.
Frontier has 226 planes on order for delivery this decade, and some of those include longer-range versions of the A321. Also, Frontier is a unit of Indigo Partners, which owns several European and Latin American airlines, and has an order book of 743 planes, which it can and occasionally has shifted around among its brands.
