Spirit adds fee for checked bags

Now another airline makes you pay to check bags — any bag.

Starting Wednesday, Spirit Airlines will charge $10 per checked bag each way if you pay at the airport. The Florida-based carrier — which flies to more than 35 U.S., Caribbean and Latin American cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco — will charge $5 per bag if you prepay online.

So checking two bags on a round-trip itinerary could cost up to $40.

Spokesman Juan Arbelaez said the fee was part of Spirit’s switch from a low-cost to an “ultra-low-cost” carrier, which he said had included reducing some fares as much as 40% this year.

“It’s a la carte service,” he said. “We want to have the passenger pay for what he really wants, not for what he doesn’t want.”

Not all passengers appreciate the change.

“How much blood can you squeeze from a rock?” said Bernadette Rivero of Los Angeles, a regular Spirit flier since the 1990s who said she learned of the bag charge Monday in e-mails from the airline. “Am I going to have to pack an extra airplane wing on my next flight?”

The fee has been phased in gradually, starting with tickets bought Dec. 15. At first it applied only to a second bag. But starting with Wednesday’s flights, it will apply to both the first and second bags. A third bag will cost $100. Oversize and overweight bags carry additional charges.

Like Spirit, Skybus Airlines, a new super-low-cost carrier based in Ohio that flies to Burbank, Oakland and other cities, charges to check a first or second bag. But the Skybus fee, $5, is the same whether paid at the airport or online, said spokesman Bob Tenenbaum.

In other changes that take effect Wednesday, Spirit Airlines will charge $1 for sodas, coffee and other nonalcoholic drinks instead of offering them for free; water will continue to be free.

Spirit will also eliminate business class, which offers priority check-in and boarding and free snacks and alcoholic drinks. In its place, the bigger seats now in business will be available at an additional charge without these extra services, said another Spirit spokeswoman, Alison Russell.