Spirit Goes Cancun Crazy With Five New Routes

Spirit Airlines is continuing its push across America’s southern border with an expansion of leisure routes to Cancun beginning this winter. The airline will add service to Cancun from five new cities with including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Austin, Philadelphia and Nashville launching across a three-week period starting Feb. 13, 2020.

The new services will increase Spirit’s Cancun presence to include 11 routes in total to the Mexican resort destination. In addition to its hubs in Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and Fort Lauderdale, Spirit also serves Cancun from Baltimore and Houston.

Unlike Spirit’s other Cancun routes, all of the new routes, except for Philadelphia-Cancun, will be limited to either three or four times weekly instead of daily. For Cleveland and Austin, the flights will be flown on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays while Pittsburgh and Nashville will be Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday flights.

The airline claims that the expansion will make it the largest American ultra-low-cost carrier in Cancun with eight flights a day. Its main rival on the Yucatan Peninsula is Frontier Airlines, which serves nine cities from Cancun with some overlap to Spirit’s existing and planned network.

For Spirit, these new routes will not go uncontested, with other carriers already operating a large portion of these flights, albeit most service is seasonal. In Pennsylvania, the airline faces competition from both ends of the state with Pittsburgh seeing seasonal service on Southwest and Delta while Philadelphia is serviced year-round on both Frontier and American.

In Cleveland, the carrier will face off again with Frontier who operates the route year-round alongside seasonal service on United. Southwest and Delta yet again are Spirit’s competitors in Nashville with seasonal service for both while Southwest and United offer seasonal service from Austin.

The new services will be operated by Spirit’s 182-seat high-density Airbus A320s.

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Ian McMurtry

Although Ian McMurtry was never originally an avgeek, he did enjoy watching US Airways aircraft across western Pennsylvania in the early 2000s. He lived along the Pennsylvania Railroad and took a liking to trains but a change of scenery in the mid-2000s saw him shift more of an interest into aviation. He would eventually express this passion by taking flying lessons in mid-Missouri and joining AirlineGeeks in 2013. Now living in Wichita, Kansas, Ian is in college majoring in aerospace engineering and minoring in business administration at Wichita State University.

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