Ben Baldanza, who turned a small, money-losing airline called Spirit into a profit-making powerhouse through a combination of ultralow prices, bare-bones service, outrageous marketing and a no-apologies approach to customer complaints, died on Nov. 5 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 62.
Scott McCartney, his co-host on the podcast “Airlines Confidential,” confirmed the death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Spirit was already a low-cost airline when Mr. Baldanza arrived in 2005, serving first as chief operating officer and then, a year later, becoming chief executive. The airline had lost $79 million the year before, and Mr. Baldanza, an industry veteran with a reputation for finding clever ways to cut costs, was given carte blanche to slash away.
Rather than trim at the edges, he took a radical approach: what he called the “bare fare.”
Passengers would pay a basic price for the flight and then shell out for virtually everything else, from printed boarding passes ($10) to water bottles ($3) and carry-on bags ($35 if the tag was printed at home, $50 at the airport).
On board, they found no business class, no back-of-the-seat movie screens and no Wi-Fi; the seats didn’t recline and legroom was minimal. To bring in more money, seemingly every square inch of space was available for advertising, including the flight attendants’ aprons and the airsickness bags.
Mr. Baldanza, an eager, media-friendly evangelist for his airline, touted the resulting ultralow fares, which averaged just $75 in 2013, down from an already low $94 in 2008. He called Spirit a “dollar store in the sky” and its aircraft “buses with wings,” and made no apologies for meager service or miserly fees.
“We care about the thing that customers tell us they care the most about, and that’s offering the lowest possible fares,” he told The New York Times in 2013, a year in which Spirit made $177.5 million.
Under Mr. Baldanza, Spirit promoted itself with audacious, often risqué ads. In 2011, following the revelation that Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, had engaged in lewd online behavior, Spirit offered a “Weiner sale,” touting $9 fares that were “too HARD to resist.”
Fliers flocked to Spirit, even as it regularly ranked worst among airlines in customer satisfaction.
Mr. Baldanza refused to back down. Instead, he ran a “Hug the Haters” campaign, offering 8,000 frequent-flier miles to people who submitted their rants against the airline to its website.
“No one goes to Chick-fil-A and complains they can’t get a burger. And people shouldn’t come to Spirit if they want lots of legroom,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “Judge us for who we are.”
Among Spirit’s most infuriating policies was its refusal to offer refunds. In 2012, a Florida Marine veteran named Jerry Meekins, who was dying of esophageal cancer but had booked one last flight to see his family in New Jersey, learned he was too ill to fly. He requested a refund, but Spirit refused.
His story got out, and soon some 40,000 people had joined a boycott against Spirit on Facebook. Eventually, the company relented, giving Mr. Meekins his money and making a $5,000 donation to the Wounded Warrior Project.
“Sometimes,” Mr. Baldanza told reporters, “we make mistakes.”
Basil Ben Baldanza Jr. was born on Dec. 3, 1961, in Rome, N.Y. His father served in the Navy and later worked for the Air Force as a civilian. His mother, Norma (Guaspari) Baldanza, was a homemaker.
Ben’s first love was music — he played trombone, and for a time aspired to be in a band — but he ended up getting a degree in policy studies and economics from Syracuse University in 1984, followed by a master’s in public administration from Princeton in 1986.
That same year he went to work for American Airlines, where he helped Robert Crandall, the chief executive, put in place new ideas like frequent-flier rewards and a hub-and-spoke system of routes. He also worked for Continental, Northwest, UPS, TACA and US Airways before coming to Spirit.
While Spirit remained alone in its extreme approach to pricing, Mr. Baldanza’s strategy echoed throughout the industry. Spirit was the first to charge for checked luggage; other airlines soon followed. And over the last decade, most carriers have adopted some form of no-frills “basic economy” fare.
The company grew rapidly under Mr. Baldanza, adding more routes and scores of planes. But eventually, the market decided he had pushed too far, and in 2015 Spirit’s share price fell by more than 50 percent, to a low of $33.77 from a high of $88.25.
Mr. Baldanza resigned in January 2016. He was immediately replaced by Robert Fornaro, who promised to improve customer service and downplay the company’s bad-boy image.
Mr. Baldanza married Marcia Moshier in 1987. She survives him, along with their son, Enzo; Mr. Baldanza’s sisters, Lia Farrington and Judy Looker; and his brother, Joe.
After leaving Spirit, Mr. Baldanza joined a number of corporate boards, taught part-time at George Mason University, collected board games (he had some 1,700) and, in 2019, joined Mr. McCartney to start a podcast.
This year, he received the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy, among the highest honors in the aviation industry, following past recipients like John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and his former mentor, Mr. Crandall.
Mr. Baldanza was diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2022. As the disease progressed, he began to lose his power of speech, and sought a solution that would allow him to remain on the podcast. He found one in an innovative artificial intelligence program that used hundreds of hours of recordings to recreate his voice, including his occasional sarcasm.
“It’s fantastic,” he told ABC 27, an affiliate in Pennsylvania, in March. “It allows me to speak like I used to.”
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