航空公司信用卡正在扰乱整个航空业的发展秩序。随着时间的推移，我对 Spirit 航空公司的倒闭感到越来越愤怒——这家以黄色飞机为标志的廉价航空公司在其短暂的经营生涯中为乘客节省了数十亿美元。Spirit 航空公司的最后一班航班于 5 月 2 日起飞。到了 8 月，美国机票价格较去年同期上涨了 23.4%；其中约三分之一的价格上涨发生在伊朗战争之前，那场战争导致航空燃油价格翻了一番，这一突如其来的成本飙升最终葬送了 Spirit 的重组计划。
Airline Credit Cards Are Messing Up the Whole Industry The more months that go by, the angrier I get about the death of Spirit Airlines, the discount carrier with the banana yellow planes that saved passengers billions of dollars over its turbulent lifetime. Spirit completed its last flight on May 2. By August, U.S. airfares had risen 23.4 percent over the prior year. About one-third of those increases occurred before the war with Iran, which doubled the price of jet fuel — a spike that ultimately proved fatal to Spirit’s plans to restructure.
对航空乘客来说，更大的损失在于：大型航空公司仍保持着不公平的融资优势，这使得其他任何航空公司都难以取代 Spirit 成为航空业中的低成本创新者。对我来说，这件事具有个人意义：Spirit 的创始人 Ned Homfeld 最初从事卡车运输业，但在 1989 年秋天，他决定进入航空业——那次决定是在我的华盛顿律师事务所里做出的。不久之后，我也成为了一家航空公司的高管。作为 Spirit 的副总裁兼法律顾问，我一直负责公司的日常运营，直到 2006 年。Spirit 是众多得益于 1978 年《航空业放松管制法案》而成立的新兴航空公司之一（其他例子还包括 Midway、America West、People Express 等）。虽然大多数这类公司都未能长期存活下来，但 Spirit 却取得了巨大成功。
The bigger loss for airline passengers is that the major carriers will retain an unfair advantage in their financing that will make it difficult for any other airline to replace Spirit as the industry’s ultralow-fare innovator and policeman. For me, it’s personal. Spirit’s founder, Ned Homfeld, started his career in trucking but made the fateful decision to enter the airline business in my Washington law office in the fall of 1989. Shortly afterward, I became an airline executive. As Spirit’s vice chairman and general counsel, I was responsible for day-to-day operations until 2006. Spirit was one of the many start-ups (Midway, America West, People Express) made possible by the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Most didn’t survive long, but Spirit soared.
2007 年，Spirit 通过推出“分离式票价”（即基础票价仅包含座位和随身行李的运输服务，其他附加服务需额外付费）这一创新举措，彻底改变了整个航空业。为了弥补这一政策带来的收入减少，Spirit 大幅降低了基础票价。这一创新催生了 Frontier、Allegiant 等一批低成本航空公司，它们的发展速度甚至超过了 Southwest 航空公司，并带动了整个航空业机票价格的下降。
In 2007, Spirit jolted the industry by pioneering unbundled fares: The base fare got you a seat and a carry-on, but you paid extra for checked bags and other options. Spirit reduced base fares significantly to compensate, and it spawned an entire class of ultralow-cost carriers, such as Frontier and Allegiant, whose growth eclipsed even Southwest’s and dragged the whole industry’s prices down with it.
关于 Spirit 航空公司倒闭的常规解释，无非是一连串的厄运：在新冠疫情爆发前几个月，该公司曾订购了多达 150 架新的空客飞机；随后又遭遇了飞行员短缺的问题；飞机发动机出现故障，导致大量飞机停飞了一年之久；一位联邦法官阻止了 JetBlue 与 Spirit 的合并；最后，伊朗战争爆发了。这些情况确实都是事实。然而，在我任职期间，Spirit 航空公司三次濒临破产的边缘——其中一次尤其严重：西北航空公司在其位于底特律的枢纽机场对 Spirit 进行了恶意的价格竞争（这种行为有详细的记录）。
The conventional account of Spirit’s death is a tale of serial bad luck: an order for up to 150 new Airbus jets placed months before Covid; a pilot shortage; engine defects that grounded many aircraft for a year; a federal judge who blocked the JetBlue merger; and finally the Iran war. All true. But Spirit survived three brushes with liquidation during my tenure, including a well-documented predatory pricing attack from Northwest Airlines at its fortress hub in Detroit.
要真正了解事情的真相，就必须关注阻碍航空公司竞争的最大因素——那就是乘客的“忠诚度计划”（即航空公司为吸引乘客而推出的各种奖励计划）。对乘客来说，这些计划可能只是免费的旅行机会；但对航空公司而言，它们其实是一笔“免费的收入”。航空公司可以利用这些计划来对付像 Spirit 这样的竞争对手，同时也能在遇到突发事件（如伊朗战争）时减轻自身的财务压力。
To understand what really happened, you must zero in on the greatest barrier to airline competition: loyalty programs. You might see them as free travel. Major airlines see them as free money, which they can use both as a weapon against carriers like Spirit and as a cushion against shocks such as the Iran war.