How Breeze Airways swooped up Spirit Airlines' routes

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Fox Business Alert. It's been more than three weeks since May 2nd, 3:00 a.m.

[00:00:04]Eastern when Spirit Airlines ceased all operations and shut down for the last time. While some travelers are still struggling to rebook flights for their summer trips and former employees job hunt for one lowcost carrier, Spirit's demise means opportunity. Even before Spirit went bankrupt, 5-year-old Breeze Airways reportedly saw a green light at the end of the runway. According to the Wall Street Journal, the day before Spirit shut down, the startup rival budget air carrier struck a deal to fill nearly all of Spirit's routes at Atlantic City International Airport.

[00:00:39]Where else could Breeze be expanding its services? Joining me now first on Fox Business, Breeze Airways founder and CEO and JetBlue Airways founder David Neilman. David, take us back to three weeks, I guess, and a few days ago. How did you spring into action to formulate that deal?

[00:00:58]Hi Liz. It's always great to be on with you. It's been uh >> we've we've been together a lot of years together. But no, it you know obviously it was the spirit thing was up and down and it was interesting that the report that just came out said they um they basically if their fuel price was zero they still would have lost money uh in the first quarter. So uh then there was the government and were they going to give money and so you know we just decided to go into Atlantic City and so we had announced Atlantic City. We were we were selling it and we were starting it like the day after that that spirit announced. So our team's really great and sometimes better be lucky than good, but uh we were in this case we were both >> Well, it feels like you would have had to move really quickly at that point because there might have been other people interested, other air carriers interested or not. I I just want to have the sort of acqueeather real feel of those moments where you negotiated that.

[00:01:52]>> Yeah, I know. You know, it's it's um like I said, we were already going in there. We we announced after the shutdown, we announced more service into into, you know, Atlantic City, but you know, it's it this business is is wide open. Anyone could come in and add flights anywhere except for just a few airports that are slot controlled. So, you know, it nothing would stop another airline from coming in if we did it. But you know the secret sauce of Breeze is that we fly we've announced 2 um 334 routes. We fly into 88 cities and about 80% we have no non-stop competition. So with our higher quality product, our first class or extra leg room seats, we can make markets work that others can't with much larger airplanes. And that was the problem with Spirit. They kept getting bigger and bigger airplanes thinking if they had lower and lower costs then you know they could but then that forced them into a bunch of markets that they were competing with different >> um okay so your audio is a little sketch but we're going to try and hold on to that for a minute but David >> would you be interested in picking up any of Spirit's jets they have some jets I would imagine they need to sell >> you know we fly different kind of aircraft Um, you know, like I just said that the way the reason Spirit's struggling is because, you know, they went to 240 seats and then they had to fly in routes where they had competition and then if people had a choice between flying Spirit and United, they they always picked United. So, ours only have 137 seats. We have 12 first class seats. Uh, we have 45 extra leg room seats and we just have a much better service offering. So, no, we're not interested in any of the Spirit airplanes.

[00:03:34]Uh this is right around the time where airlines are jacking up prices because jet fuel has gotten unbelievably high due to the fact that the straight of Hormuz has been shut down for what 13 weeks now and so much of the oil the global oil is going through there and it's been halted at least for the moment. So what is it that you are doing where you are able to have such inexpensive flights and we can put some of these up on the screen here but such inexpensive routes I mean uh if you've got jet fuel prices 99 bucks that was right before this a barrel right before the war began and the week ending 20 May 22nd we're at $159 a barrel. Right now, we're looking at domestic flights overall up 15%. It's really unbelievable. And yet, you guys are able to do in some cases under a hundred bucks for for a route.

[00:04:32]>> We got really fuel efficient airplanes.

[00:04:34]They burn less fuel than any other airplane on the market. But, you know, Liz, what's interesting, it's actually worse than what you said as far as the price of fuel because you're talking about the price of crew. The actual what we call the crack spread, the refining cost has taken our cost of jet fuel double what we were paying.

[00:04:56]We froze. That's okay. Uh David Neilman, let's see if we can unfreeze him. But if we can't, I want to talk through some of the prices. The average domestic Can we keep that up, please? Just for one quick second. the average domestic roundtrip flight prices for uh let's just say New York City to Orlando. You've got American Airlines 240 to 310 bucks.

[00:05:20]Delta 250 to 320. United 230 to 300.

[00:05:24]Southwest 220 to 290. JetBlue. You see Breeze 180 bucks. So these these fairs are incredibly inexpensive and Breeze has hit many different routes that nobody else was taking on. Some of the smaller ones, you had Atlantic City to Orlando, Florida to Cancun. And David, again, you said you have very fuel efficient uh planes. Who's who's making them? Why why doesn't Delta have >> We have the We have the Airbus A220.

[00:05:57]Delta does have us them, but there's they're, you know, maybe 3% of their airplanes. They have a thousand different airplanes, but because we can fly in these markets, that makes sense.

[00:06:08]You know, Delta and other carriers use them more as feeders into their hubs and we use them to go pointtooint. So, if you're in Westchester County and you want to fly to Charleston or where I'm at today, celebrating our fifth year anniversary, or you want to fly to Vero Beach, then we're the only way to get you there. And so people just really love going non-stop on a on a really comfortable airplane with a great product. And u you know, as I was saying, we looks like we're we made money in the first quarter. In the second quarter, our extraordinary fuel expense is going to be about $60 million more than we had budgeted and it looks like we're still going to make make money in the second quarter. So it it's really tribute to all the people at Breeze that are doing such a great job taking care of our guests.

[00:06:52]>> Well, David, don't underell yourself.

[00:06:54]This is the fifth successful airline that you that you've started. I remember you and I in 19 what 99 on the tarmac at LaGuardia playing basketball with the baggage handlers at JetBlue. Um you've got the mightest touch when it comes to these things. Thanks for joining us.

[00:07:11]>> Thanks Liz. Thank you so much.

[00:07:13]>> Good to see you and happy fifth anniversary for Breeze.

[00:07:16]Thank you.