Spirit Airlines Offers $69 Airfares Along With Racy Ad – Is It Offensive?
Spirit Airlines is taking heat for a special promotion that’s accompanied by a rather racy ad, KMSP (Minneapolis) is reporting.
In honor of the “historic” purchase of their 69th plane, the ultra-low-cost (and no-frills) airline is sponsoring a special deal that expires at midnight on March 17: $69 round-trip airfares to and from select cities on select dates.
Because the number 69 features so prominently in the deal, Spirit Airlines’ advertising department chose to mark the occasion with an ad full of double entendre and sexual innuendo.
Whether the ad is offensive or not is, of course, a matter of taste, as KMSP writer Aaron Rupar points out.
“You can’t object to that price point, but you certainly can object to the discount airline’s marketing strategy, which is so juvenile it led us to wonder if Spirit’s website was hacked.”
Perhaps someone in Spirit’s advertising department told their 12-year-old son to write the ad copy?
Or perhaps only KMSP was offended by it. KMGH (Denver) and The Broward Sun-Sentinel, among other media outlets, reported on the Spirit Airlines ad with straightforward articles that didn’t mention any offense at the promotion’s racy content.
Nevertheless, KMSP contacted Spirit Airlines to make sure the promotion, and accompanying racy ad copy, wasn’t a joke. A spokesperson confirmed that the ad is legit.
“It’s a real promotion. It’s not atypical for us to have these types of ads. Spirit isn’t your typical airline. In most cases different means saving our customers a lot of money on their air travel. When it comes to advertising, different means we don’t spend a lot of money on advertising – because that just increases fares. But we’re also different because our ads are fun and often irreverent.”
To say Spirit Airlines isn’t a typical airline is to make a colossal understatement. The discount airline’s notoriously low airfares are also accompanied by notoriously poor customer service, according to Forbes, and the airline’s CEO makes no apologies for it.
“Let [the customer] tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”
So poor is Spirit Airlines’ customer service that, in 2012, the discount carrier was the subject of a nationwide boycott after refusing to refund a dying man’s $176 ticket because he was too sick to fly, according to this Inquisitr report.
Do you find the Spirit Airlines $69 ad offensive? Share your thoughts in the Comments below.
