The headlines for the country's biggest budget airlines have been bad and getting worse: Too many open seats, leading to the low fares that travelers love but investors hate. Bruising financial losses. Drastic changes to fees and onboard seating in a bid to survive.
And then there's Sun Country – still posting healthy profits for two years straight and counting. While Minnesota's relatively tiny low-cost carrier isn't growing nearly as fast as it was just a year or two ago, it's stable at a time when many of its competitors aren't.
So for now, it's a waiting game. If airlines like Spirit or Frontier eventually shrink – or disappear altogether – Sun Country could benefit.
“What we’re going to be waiting on is for some of our competitors to go through some challenging times and free up some opportunity for us,” CEO Jude Bricker told investors on Friday in a quarterly earnings call.
Sun Country has been a household name in Minnesota for decades, long before its transition to a low-cost carrier. In the years since, it's had some high-profile stumbles that have left a bad taste in once-loyal flyers mouths. And questions about its reliability still linger, including after some mass cancellations in June and again on the day of the CrowdStrike outage last month – though it recovered fast enough to rescue stranded Delta passengers that weekend.
Yet Sun Country has successfully challenged Delta's dominance in Minneapolis. It has has just struggled to grow outside of Minnesota. And now's not the time.
Sun Country is facing the same headwinds as Spirit, Frontier, and every other airline in the country: In Minneapolis and nationwide, there are just too many planes flying over the U.S. skies.
As travel demand exploded after the worst of the pandemic passed, airlines big and small rushed in unison to add more flights. Fast forward to 2024, there are more planes and seats than carriers can hope to fill, forcing them to cut prices and swallow financial losses. Even financially healthy airlines like Delta and United have admitted it's a major problem.
The upside for travelers? Dirt-cheap domestic flight prices – and not just on Spirit or Sun Country, but even on the country's bigger, pricier airlines. Flight prices are all about supply and demand, and the supply has never been higher.
Bricker said that problem peaked in July and should continue to trend downward through the end of the year as airlines scale back their schedules. The downside? That steady stream of cheap domestic flights may become a bit harder to find.
“Fares will probably settle close to where they are, maybe a little bit higher,” he said.
But for the foreseeable future, Sun Country is shifting more of its eggs away from ferrying passengers and toward cargo. In addition to operating charter flights for Major League Soccer (MLS) and the military, that cargo business has been a lifeline for Sun Country while its competitors struggle. And it's becoming even more important.
The airline inked an extended deal in June to carry even more packages for Amazon, expanding a partnership that began just before the pandemic. That will see Sun Country cut some of its bread-and-butter passenger flying, starting next spring and summer.
Bricker said that'll mostly entail chopping off a few of the daily or weekly frequencies where it currently flies but also temporarily ending service altogether to some cities – he specifically mentioned nearby airports in the upper Midwest where they're going head to head with Delta. But even those cities cut would come back by the summer of 2026, he assured reporters Friday.
With all their focus on ramping up Amazon Prime flights, Sun Country might not be able to swoop in if Spirit or Frontier contract anytime soon. But beyond that, their ongoing struggles could provide an opening for Sun Country to expand.
“If something happens quickly … then we might not be able to take advantage of it,” Bricker said.
“It’s kind of a wait and see,” he added later. I don’t have any concrete predictions around what happens with Spirit and Frontier, in particular.”