www.CostaRicaTicas.com

all in a nut shell:
Spirit admittedly took Ryanair as one of its models—maybe its most important model. And it has replicated many of Ryanair's trademark excesses. It even innovated a bit, becoming the first line to propose a charge for carry-on baggage in the overhead bins. It, too, flies planes with seats that do not recline—seats on its newest planes are even a bit tighter than Ryanair's, at a knee-crunching 28 inches. Like Ryanair, it charges extra for just about everything—seat assignments, checked baggage, you name it.

Spirit has emulated Ryanair in another area: A "passenger usage fee," buried in the fine print, for buying a ticket anywhere but at an airport counter—and that means an extra fee for booking online. As with Allegiant, the other line that does this, it's an "almost mandatory" fee that is very difficult, expensive, or time-consuming for almost everyone to avoid.

Spirit has also been guilty, in my mind, of crossing the line on Department of Transportation' s rule on fare advertising: In its recent supposed $2 "sale" fares, the true fare wasn't $2 at all, it was $2 plus a "fuel pass-through" that ran at least $20 and usually more.

As you might expect, Spirit's hard-nosed policies on fees and customer service generally earn it lots of space in various complaint venues:

•Spirit is not large enough to be covered in the Department of Transportation' s standard measure of complaints per 100,000 passengers. However, its raw number of complaints for the month of April—35—is higher than for any other low-fare line, even Southwest (23) and others that are much larger.
•Epinions composite ratings rank Spirit at two-and-a-half stars, below any large domestic line currently flying.
•Of the 300 most resent Spirit postings on My3Cents, only six were complimentary— as far as I can tell, this is by far the worst proportion of any domestic airline.
•Spirit showed 73 postings on RipoffReport, compared with 4 for Allegiant, 11 for JetBlue, and 31 for Southwest.
•On Viewpoints, 59 percent of the ratings were one-star, the lowest option available, and Spirit showed an overall 75 percent "thumbs down" score. By contrast, JetBlue shows 59 percent at five-star, the top rating, and 89 percent thumbs up; Allegiant is a composite 2.25 stars, and Southwest rates 4.19 stars.