Spirit Airlines cancelled all of its flights and shut down permanently at 3 AM Eastern time on Saturday May 2, 2026. Customer service is gone. The phones are off.
The website directs passengers to a restructuring page. If you have a Spirit ticket for any flight between now and the rest of the summer, here is what you need to do immediately.
The airline released an official statement this morning:
“It is with great disappointment that on May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effective immediately. To our Guests: all flights have been cancelled, and customer service is no longer available.”
This is the first major American airline to go out of business in 25 years.
Approximately 9,000 flights are cancelled between today and the end of May alone, 1.8 million seats gone, averaging about 300 flights and 60,000 passengers per day through the end of the month.
The summer schedule is cancelled entirely. Seventeen thousand jobs are gone. Do not go to the airport expecting Spirit staff to be there. There is no one there.
What To Do If You Have Spirit Tickets
If you paid for your Spirit ticket with a credit card or debit card and booked directly through Spirit, the airline says it will automatically process a refund to your original form of payment.
Do not wait for that automatic refund to appear before taking action. Call your credit card issuer right now and initiate a chargeback.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy specifically encouraged Spirit passengers to do this. Federal law protects you, non-delivery of service entitles you to a full reversal of the charge, and a chargeback is the fastest path to seeing that money.
If you booked through a travel agent, call the travel agent directly. Spirit says those passengers should not deal with Spirit directly but rather go through the agent who made the booking.
If you paid with a Spirit voucher, a travel credit, or Free Spirit loyalty points, the situation is more complicated.
Compensation for those passengers will be determined through the bankruptcy court process, which means no guaranteed timeline and no guaranteed amount.
Those passengers should file a claim at spiritrestructuring.com and then immediately start looking at other options for their travel.
Spirit stated explicitly that it will not reimburse passengers for incidental costs caused by the cancellations, emergency hotels, meals, transportation to and from airports, or the difference in price between a Spirit ticket and a last-minute replacement flight.
If you have travel insurance, call your provider today. Many travel insurance policies cover airline bankruptcy, and that call needs to happen before you rebook.
What Airlines Are Doing To Help
The airline industry and the federal government responded quickly. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that he had reached agreements with United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines to cap ticket prices on routes that Spirit previously served.
The stated goal is to prevent the kind of price gouging that can occur when 60,000 daily passengers suddenly need to find seats on other carriers simultaneously.
American Airlines announced it is offering rescue fares for affected Spirit passengers and is reviewing opportunities to fly larger aircraft on routes it shares with Spirit to increase available capacity. American will cap main cabin ticket prices on shared routes.
Frontier Airlines, the carrier with arguably the most overlap with Spirit’s budget route network, announced it is offering Spirit customers up to 50 percent off base fares.
That is the most aggressive rescue pricing of any carrier announced so far and Frontier is likely to absorb a significant portion of Spirit’s displaced passengers given their similar market positioning.
JetBlue posted publicly that it is ready to help any Spirit passenger whose travel plans were disrupted.
Southwest said it has options available for customers holding Spirit reservations.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, where Spirit had approximately 27 percent market share and was by far the most dominant carrier, mobilized customer service representatives early Saturday morning to help passengers arriving at the airport who did not yet know the airline was gone.
How To Find A Replacement Flight
Start with the airline websites that have announced rescue fares, American, Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, United and Delta are all the places to look first.
Do not assume that any single carrier has the best price on the specific route you need. Check all of them.
If you are mid-trip, meaning you traveled outbound on Spirit and have a return Spirit flight booked, you are in the most urgent situation.
You need a new return ticket immediately, before last-minute prices climb further. Walk-up fares on any carrier are the most expensive in the industry.
The rescue fare caps that Duffy brokered are designed specifically to address this, but they apply to nonstop routes and their duration has not been specified publicly. Act today.
Google Flights, Kayak and similar aggregators will show you prices across carriers simultaneously.
Run those searches now and then book directly through the airline you choose to ensure you are getting the rescue fare pricing rather than a marked-up third-party rate.
If your destination was primarily or exclusively served by Spirit, Latrobe, Pennsylvania is one example where Spirit was the only commercial carrier for years, call the nearest major airport for alternatives and check bus or train options as a backup.
What This Means For Summer Travel And Fares
Spirit was the eighth largest airline in the United States by seats offered in 2025.
It accounted for approximately 2 percent of domestic flights scheduled for this summer. Those flights, and those seats, are now gone. The passengers who would have filled them are competing for space on the remaining carriers.
All air carriers have been dealing with elevated jet fuel costs since the start of the Iran conflict in late February 2026, and fares were already above normal seasonal levels heading into Memorial Day weekend.
The sudden removal of Spirit’s 60,000 daily seats will accelerate fare increases across the industry, particularly on the routes where Spirit was a significant presence.
Fort Lauderdale, Detroit, Baltimore, Orlando and Chicago Midway are the airports where Spirit’s absence will be felt most sharply.
Rescue fare caps are a short-term measure. They will not last indefinitely.
If you have summer travel plans on any carrier and can lock in a price today, doing so before the full market impact of Spirit’s closure filters through is worth considering.
The 34 Years That Just Ended
Spirit Airlines operated for 34 years. It pioneered the unbundled fare model in American aviation, the approach of charging the lowest possible base fare and then charging separately for everything from checked bags to carry-on luggage to seat selection.
That model was controversial with passengers who felt nickel-and-dimed, but its impact on American aviation was substantial. It forced every major carrier to create basic economy fare tiers to compete, pushing prices down across the industry for millions of travelers who never flew Spirit themselves.
“We are proud of the impact of our ultra-low-cost model on the industry over the last 34 years and had hoped to serve our guests for many years to come,” the company said in its final statement.
The shutdown is the first significant airline closure in the United States since Midway Airlines ceased operations immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
It puts 17,000 people out of work, 14,000 Spirit employees and thousands of contractors and others whose employment depended on the carrier’s operations.
spiritrestructuring.com is the official site where all current Spirit passengers can check on refund status and next steps.
