Frontier Airlines, known for its cheap fares and fees for everything from bringing a backpack to buying an in-flight drink, is making a bid for wealthy travelers’ wallets. The discount airline will introduce first-class seating on its planes, the company announced Tuesday, part of a greater trend of low-cost carriers premiumizing flight options.
In order to install the new first-class seats, Frontier will scrap the first two rows of three-by-three economy seats in its current fleet and retrofit the larger chairs in two-by-two rows at the front of the aircrafts. The airline will begin offering the seats in late 2025.
Along with new seating, Frontier will rework its loyalty program so customers will be able to trade in miles for waived baggage fees and seating upgrades. It will also dole out free seat upgrades to gold-tier members and above, and free companion tickets to platinum- and diamond-level members.
“We’ve listened to customers, and they want more—more premium options, like first class seating, attainable seat upgrades, more free travel for their companions, and the ability to use miles on more than just airfare,” Frontier CEO Barry Biffle said in a press release.
The changes come on the heels of an overhaul of its pricing structure announced earlier this year, in which the airline introduced four different booking options—from the cheapest basic to more expensive business—and ditched change and cancellation fees for three of those options.
Other discount airlines have made similar changes to appeal to revenge-spending passengers willing to shell out on travel, such as Spirit Airlines blocking out the middle seat for customers travelling within Europe, and Southwest Airlines expanding leg room and doing away with its chaotic choose-your-own-seat model.
After the pandemic, “there is a clear preference for more premium,” Southwest CEO Robert Jordan told the Associated Press last month. “Premium is kind of self-defined—whether that is extra legroom, first-class to Europe, whatever it is—but there is a rise in the desire for premium, something a little better.”
Biffle expects Frontier’s latest premiumization to bring in $250 million revenue in 2026 and more than $500 million in 2028.
The view from the cheap seats
Low-cost carriers’ appeal to wealthier travelers is ultimately a bid to rescue themselves from a financial model that has hemorrhaged money. Despite U.S. Airlines seeing record travel in 2024, discount carriers haven’t seen strong returns. Spirit Airlines, the U.S.’s seventh-largest airline by passenger amount, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November due to hiked-up fuel prices and labor costs that dissolved profit margins across the sector. While that may mean one less competitor for Frontier, it hasn’t fared much better, reporting in its October earnings $935 million in revenue but only $26 million in net income.
What’s more, large legacy carriers like Delta and American Airlines have been eating the lunch of their low-cost counterparts, as they already have the ability to both dole out plushier perks to those who can afford it: Delta will offer Shake Shake to its first-class flyers starting this month, for example. But to take advantage of last-minute travelers and revenge spenders, airlines also expanded routes to tourist hotspots, and the greater capacity meant more empty seats to be filled and lower airfare to entice travelers to fill those seats.
Discount airlines copying this strategy, combining better amenities and discount prices, often ultimately means higher fares for customers in the long run, which could weaken low-cost carriers’ reputations for being, well, low-cost. It’s a calculated risk for budget airlines that cannot afford to lose more money.
“You cannot, if you are on the lower end of the industry’s food chain, continue to post losses,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in an earnings call in July, “particularly given the health of the demand set we’ve seen over these last couple of years.”
