Frontier Airlines is going after its cash-strapped discount competitor, Spirit Airlines, with a 20-route announcement that includes 18 that Spirit flies.
Frontier will start most of the routes in November and all of them by February, with an emphasis on Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, New Orleans and Spirit's home base of Fort Lauderdale.
In an interview, Frontier CEO Barry Biffle described the route announcement as part of an effort to be the top ultralow-cost carrier in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas. He said the route choices aren't geared specifically toward applying pressure on Spirit, which recently warned that it could cease operations within a year if it continues to bleed money.
"This is not about Spirit. This is about Frontier becoming America's low-fare airline," Biffle said. "This is about having the network that makes sense. And about having more seats and more routes to more places in the top 20 metros than any other low-cost carrier."
Barry Biffle
Frontier has attempted to acquire Spirit twice this decade. In February 2022, the airlines had a merger agreement, but Spirit's shareholders abandoned it for a higher bid from JetBlue that ended up being blocked by the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division in 2024.
This past January, when Spirit was in Chapter 11, Frontier again proposed a merger, but Spirit rejected the offer.
Some are leisure routes, but not all
The new Frontier routes will include seven in Houston, six in Detroit, six in Fort Lauderdale, four in Baltimore, four in New Orleans and two each in Charlotte and Dallas.
Many of the routes include at least one major leisure destination, including the ones touching Fort Lauderdale and New Orleans, as well as services from Baltimore and Detroit to Cancun. But several of the routes are not geared toward vacationers, including connections between Detroit and Houston, Charlotte and Detroit, and Houston and Philadelphia.
The routes will all launch with frequencies of three times per week or fewer, which tends to be much lower than the frequencies offered on those city pairs by Spirit. For example, on Frontier's six new Detroit routes serving Cancun, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Miami, New Orleans and Charlotte, the airline will fly a combined total of 14 weekly frequencies. Spirit is scheduled to fly approximately 55 weekly frequencies on those routes in November, according to Cirium flight schedule data.
Low-frequency service limits the competitive impact. But it could ease the path for increasing frequency if Spirit shuts down.
"We are just looking at the holes we have in our network to be the primary low-cost carrier in every major metro," Biffle said. "We looked at those opportunities that we announced today and we saw those as a void that we needed in Detroit, we needed in Houston, we needed in Charlotte, Dallas, Baltimore. These are all major metros, and if we want to be number one in those cities, we view that we need to have those added to our network. We think they make sense strategically for that reason and that's why we're adding them. And we're going to continue to add more."