Here's The Latest Attempt By Spirit Airlines To Exploit Events In The News

Spirit Airlines, which has a history of jumping on whatever current event it can, is at it again.

Now it has come up with a 9-9-9 vacation plan in an ode to GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain's catchy 9-9-9 tax plan.

The airline's last pair of ads that involved politicians were about shamed Congressman Jeff "DM Fail" Weiner and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's respective scandals.

But is this latest one a smart move for the airline?

If anything, Spirit is consistent and knows how to grab your attention. It's a cheap alternative, and has a steadily growing reputation for having crappy customer service and having fees for seemingly every little thing. 

The ads usually don't explicitly take a side (like these do, for example), though this does have the feel of an endorsement, compared to those Schwarzenegger and Weiner ads. Spirit still shouldn't have to worry about instantly alienating half the country.

This Cain promotion also doesn't have an immature sexual innuendo like "The Weiner Sale" and others did, and it's still getting national attention, so maybe it'll hold back on those in the future. Nah, who are we kidding, these are the folks that brought us the MUFF and MILF campaigns, remember? Spirit even had a campaign which featured strippermobiles driving around Los Angeles. Trashy.

All that trashiness and blatant exploitation of whatever is going on in the country is what makes each one of Spirit's ad campaigns light up the news -- but maybe it doesn't need to do both in every campaign to get that exposure. Either way, at this point, there's not much of a brand reputation left for it to worry about anyway.

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Airlines Squeezed Out A Record $1.83 Billion In Fees Last Quarter

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Check your wallet: The U.S. Department of Transportation reports it only took three months for airlines to rack up $1.38 billion in fees.

The fees fall into two catagories: checked baggage fees and reservation change fees.

BTS reports U.S. carriers collected $783,696,000 million worth of baggage fees this quarter, compared to $104,681,000 during the same time in 2007.

Topping this year's list was American Airlines, which earned $197,971,000 in baggage fees alone.

Reservation change fees cost travelers almost $600 million dollars this quarter, nearly $400 more than they paid in 2007. As a result of such fees, airlines are on pace to generate $5.5 billion this year, not including holiday travel spikes–a 300% increase from 2007.

Thankfully, the government is pissed about this practice too, and in July the Department of Transportation drafted a proposal requiring airlines to disclose more information on what fees are being collected and how they're going about it.

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