June 2015.
I’m in Detroit hosting Camp and on the last day, Spirit Airlines cancels my team’s flight to NYC.
Typically canceled flights aren’t a big deal… you grab another coffee and wait. But Spirit is a special kind of hell.
It was Monday and the next available flight to NYC was Friday. They wanted us to rot in Daytwah 4 more nights with no hotel or accommodations otherwise. Fat chance.
Naturally I started tweeting. I wanted Spirit’s customer service team to a) acknowledge my pain and then b) do something about it. Full refund, maybe? Last minute booking on a partner airline, perhaps?
But then we realized something: Spirit airlines doesn’t have a customer service team.
I’m serious. Just read their Twitter bio:
Needless to say, my tweets were useless. We had to take matters into our own hands.
Within an hour, my team of 7 decided to drive back to NYC. We rented an SUV from Hertz, paid $38 extra to drop the car in a different city, and hit the road.
In an effort to remain sane, we decided to seek sweet revenge on our traveling foe.
The result? We launched @SpiritCares (now suspended) and began having illegal customer service conversations with unhappy customers.
We started small, like teenagers and gateway drugs:
Then we got addicted:
Some people got the joke:
But most people didn’t:
Approximately 24 hours and 250+ tweets later, Spirit shut us down:
Oh well. At least I was asleep at home when it happened.