There was a time when one out of every three passengers flying through Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport were carrying boarding passes from Spirit Airlines. Even as the ultra-discount airline moved in and out of bankruptcy and shaved down its flight schedule, it remained the dominant airline at the airport.
Spirit flew 11 million passengers in and out of FLL in 2024, marking the high point for the airline’s traffic there. Its 31.4% market share that year was only eclipsed by the pandemic-inspired travel boom of 2021 when it collected a 32.7% market share at the airport.
Spirit held onto its top market share in Fort Lauderdale for six straight years and looked to continue that reign this year until it abruptly shut down before dawn Saturday morning, a casualty of a bankruptcy turnaround plan that did not account for the rapid jump in jet fuel prices due to the war in Iran.
The Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport was Spirit’s flagship home. Its terminals and runways sit just a mile — as the crow flies — from its Dania Beach corporate headquarters.
Spirit occupied 10 gates at FLL in 2022, including four international gates. The airport has 66 gates in all, concentrating on low-cost carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest. The new $400m Terminal 5 is expected to open in the middle of this year. Since ground was broken on the project in 2023, commercial passenger traffic has dropped by 8% to just over 32 million passengers last year.
Spirit was responsible for 9 million of those passengers. It will be zero now.
“ Fort Lauderdale airport has been just dealt a devastating blow,” said DePaul University transportation professor Joe Schwieterman.
“While Spirit held the largest share of passenger traffic as of March this year, other carriers have experienced significant growth over the last two years,” said FLL CEO Mark Gale in a statement emailed to WLRN. "We continue to see interest from other airlines, such as JetBlue, for new or expanded service at FLL, which is expected to offset some of the shortfall from Spirit's absence."
READ MORE: Spirit Airlines built a model the industry copied. Then it collapsed.
Other airlines have stepped into the market Spirit left. JetBlue, the number two market share air carrier at FLL, announced Monday a series of new and additional flights from the airport. They include new flights to Baltimore and Charlotte beginning in July and trips to Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis in November. JetBlue also added new non-stop flights between FLL and five other cities including Chicago and Houston starting July 9. And it will add more flights on existing routes to Austin, Dominican Republic and other destinations.
Spirit’s financial troubles were myriad. It had hoped a $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue would keep it in the air. However, two years after the buyout was announced, a Boston federal judge blocked the deal in 2024 ruling it was anticompetitive by reducing competition and increasing airfares. Now, JetBlue hopes to fill gaps left in FLL’s flight schedule by Spirit’s undoing.
A second airline that has its roots with JetBlue also has announced new routes after the Spirit collapse. Breeze Airways founder and CEO David Neeleman founded JetBlue in the late 1990s. Breeze revealed four new flights from Atlantic City, NJ — another airport where Spirit was the primary carrier. Breeze flies to several smaller cities from Fort Lauderdale, however none are daily flights. That will change in July when breeze begins non-stop service between FLL and Jacksonville each day.
The end of Spirit flights at FLL is the second blow to the airport’s traffic in three years. Southwest shifted most of its international flights from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando International Airport in 2023. At the time, Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Orlando “offered better connectivity in our domestic network.”
Since then, the number of Southwest passengers through FLL has fallen by 37% to 3 million last year. Southwest’s market share fell below 10%.
The Broward County Aviation Department generated $386 million in revenue during the 2025 fiscal year. That was a 13% increase even as the number of revenue-generating passengers at FLL fell. The aviation department’s financials include FLL and the general aviation airport, North Perry. The largest source of the department’s revenues are from airlines — responsible for 40 cents of every dollar. The money is generated through leases and landing fees, and a bulk of that came from Spirit.
Almost 13% of Broward County’s aviation revenue came from Spirit.
“The Aviation Department anticipates a significant recovery of potential passenger loss or revenue contraction to be backfilled by competing carriers,” it wrote in its 2025 annual report published in late March.
Spirit would shut down completely just a month later.
“The long term prognosis (for FLL) is good,” Schwieterman said. “Short term, I think they'll be wooing some of the ultra discounters to come and set up shop.”
