For better or for worse, B. Ben Baldanza may be the airline executive of the future.
A profile in Sunday’s New York Times makes clear that Baldanza, the CEO of Spirit Airlines, does not believe that the customer is always right.
A Florida-based, privately held airline, Spirit flies to the Caribbean and Latin America.
It offers low, low fares ($9 if you’re really lucky) supplemented by a wide variety of additional fees ($20 for a good seat, $100 for a third bag).
According to the Times, the airline takes the word “non-refundable” very literally.
Perhaps because of this and other practices and policies, Spirit leads U.S. carriers in complaints by an astonishing margin.
Spirit, which had more than 5 million passengers in 2008, had 14.3 complaints per 100,000 passengers. US Airways had the second highest number of complaints, 2 per 100,000.
While he doesn’t point to his company’s high numbers with pride, Baldanza doesn’t seem to see them as necessarily negative.
“We know that frustrations about Spirit exist,” he told the Times. “To some extent, it’s about a mismatch of expectations. For years, in this industry, if you whined, we gave you something. You yell, we waive a fee. That’s created a general expectation that airlines will break their own policies - and we don’t.”
Baldanza’s hard-line stance toward customer complaints spun throughout the Internet in 2007 after he-mailed a colleague about a passenger complaint.
By accident, Baldanza hit “reply all” when sending the e-mail and it went on to the disgruntled passenger, as well as to the intended recipient.
In the e-mail, Baldanza wrote: “Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown before with us anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”
Saving a penny is the key to Spirit’s marketing massage, as is stressed in its low-budget television spots, advertisements that have what the Times calls, “the production values of hostage videos.”
One offering shows a snarky young man in bed and on the phone. “Dude, there is no way your mom is cheating on your dad,” he says to the caller.
An older woman then snuggles into the frame - it’s the cheating mom of course.
“You think that’s low?” a narrator asks. “Spirit Airlines fares are even lower.
Baldanza, 47, a native of Rome, N.Y., and a graduate of Syracuse University and Princeton University, came to Spirit as president and chief operating officer in January 2005.
Before that he had been senior vice president of marketing and planning for US Airways.
Previous to that, he had been managing director and chief operating officer of Grupo Taca, an airline based in El Salvador, Central America.
Baldanza is also a self-described “boardgame geek” who reviews games for several online sites.
His wife, Marcia A. Baldanza, also a boardgame enthusiast, is an educator who is currently serving as the lead restructuring administrator for Palm Beach County schools.
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