Ben Baldanza can’t curb his enthusiasm

Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza broke into an impression of Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David during the airline’s third-quarter earnings conference call. “I’d say we feel pretty, PRETTY good,” he jovially said while discussing Spirit’s present and future financial status.

Unlike the perpetually cranky comedian, Baldanza has little to complain about these days. Profitable Spirit is poised for a major expansion next year—adding  15 new aircraft, including six Airbus A321s and an A320neo—and believes its 2015 operating margin will be around 20% even as it grows capacity by 30% year-over-year.

Spirit designs its business model for a high fuel cost environment. So the recent dip in fuel prices is icing on the cake for the “ultra” low-cost carrier. “Lower fuel prices create a little bit of tailwind in the margin,” Baldanza said. “We are a margin driven airline.”

Baldanza thinks Spirit has two things really going for it right now: 1) there appears to be ample room to grow in the ULCC sector in the US and 2) Spirit is basically unopposed in that sector.

The Florida-based carrier doesn’t concern itself too much with what the major US airlines are doing because it believes it is targeting an entirely different group of passengers who care about ultra low fares above all else. “We’re carrying different customers than Delta or Southwest is carrying,” Baldanza said. “In general, our decision about where to fly is about how much new traffic we can generate with our lower fares, not about how much traffic we can take away from X, Y and Z. When we believe we can fill an aircraft, we’ll add a flight. That’s kind of how it works.”

And neither ULCCs Frontier Airlines (a newcomer to the sector Baldanza has been fairly dismissive of) nor Allegiant Air are viewed as significant rivals at this point. “We don’t really see any meaningful competition in the ULCC space other than Allegiant, but Allegiant is serving different size cities than we are, so Allegiant is more synergistic than competition,” Baldanza explained.

Spirit, to its credit, does not hide from the Larry David-esque complaining passengers engage in regarding the airline’s low-amenity, fee-heavy pricing structure. In fact, this week it issued a “State of Hate” report replete with a video of puppet newscasters chronicling the “frustrations” expressed to Spirit about it and air travel in general. One “surprising aspect of the feedback was the level of vitriol and expletives used in many of the hate messages,” Spirit noted, adding that it has created a “Vulgarity Index” for “the different curse words that are used to describe the respondents’ hate for air travel.”