Spirit Airlines has been hampered by flight delays and cancellations in recent days amid unexpected weather and "operational challenges", but the carrier's struggles don't appear to be ending anytime soon, according to CEO Ted Christie.
Spirit has canceled hundreds of flights this past week-including nearly 40 percent of its Friday schedule-but Christie told ABC News that he expects the cancellations to continue into early next week. "We are starting to turn the tide here and get our operation back moving again. There will still be cancellations over the next few days, but we can start to build back to a full operation."
"How we got here really starts with a very challenging, operating month in the month of July," Christie said in an interview with the news outlet. "Weather delays and logistics delays throughout the air transportation system built throughout the course of the month and ate away at all the redundancy that we had in our system."
Christie acknowledged the unfair burden on customers and apologized on behalf of the airline. "It's been a terrible week for us, for our guests," Christie said. "We offer our apology to all of our guests that have been impacted here, and to our team members who are working really hard. It's been a rough week for sure."
"We believe we've taken care of our guests at this point, and we think we're caught up there. We've either gotten them re-accommodated on Spirit or another airline or we've put them into a hotel or gotten them where they needed to be," he told ABC News.
"While we strive for perfection in everything we do, in the times that we don't we are humble enough that we look inside and figure out ways to get better and Spirit has been getting better over the last five years or so, and while this has been a terrible last few days we have to do the same thing here. We have to do everything in our power to earn back their confidence, their business. And that starts with building the airline back, making it as reliable as we want it to be."
Demand for air travel is rebounding more than one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently recording its fifth consecutive day of screening two million or more passengers.
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