When Delta Charges for Something Spirit Would Never Charge For

Jeanne Marie Hoffman May 15, 2015 Flights Leave a comment

Spirit is known as the carrier with all the fees. Want to bring your bag on-board? That’s $100 at gate. Want us to print your boarding pass? That’ll be $10.

Want a water? That’s $1. Need to use the bathroom? …still free. For now.

But there’s one thing Spirit won’t charge extra money for. But Delta apparently does.

From IJ Review:

When he went online to purchase two tickets — one for himself and one for his four-year-old daughter — he found that he was unable to find two seats together.

…

But the ticketing agent told him that in order to sit next to his daughter, he would have to pay an additional $88 for Economy Plus seats.

When booking his tickets, he selected the age of his child. His four-year old child. But the system wouldn’t let them sit together.

Delta’s own unaccompanied minor program does not let 4 year-olds fly alone. Even if the families wanted to fly apart from them*.

So this makes absolutely no sense to me.

But Spirit–the king of charging extra for everything–doesn’t separate families.

Sure, you may not get a seat assignment until you check in, but they won’t separate kids from their families. They don’t promise not to seperate parties without kids in them, but Tiff has never had anyone separate her from her husband.

But in this case, Delta booked his daughter 11 rows away. If he didn’t buy the economy-plus seats, it also causes an awkward situation on board. Of course he’ll want to switch (well, maybe not of course*). And hopefully the people on the airplane will be amenable to that. But these types of situations also involve someone having to give up their nicer seat assignment to make things happen–an act Delta shouldn’t put the burden on them to do.

So Spirit may not be the most luxurious, but they won’t separate families. That, in addition to them being affordable, makes them still a great choice for being able to manage more travel and experiences for your family.

*I sat next to a little girl once whose parents were sitting in first class. She was in the middle seat between me and a gentleman. I realized half-way through the flight that she was terrified. I tried giving her a video game to play, but that only freaked her out more (oops.) In that case, the parents intentionally sat away from her. Just seeing how scared she was has made me really sympathetic to families sitting apart.