CLEVELAND — Thousands of Americans are still left stranded in airports at the peak of travel season. Spirit Airlines canceled 50% of its flights today, bringing the total to more than 2000 since Sunday. The chaos is leaving Cleveland Hopkins International Airport travelers frustrated heading into the weekend.
News 5 caught up with Angelique Abrams at Hopkins Friday night. Abrams is scrambling to get things done before a wedding on Saturday.
"I missed everything—everybody has been calling, saying, ‘where are you, what you are doing' and you see what time I’m getting here, I missed everything."
The airline blamed a perfect storm of weather, system outages and staffing shortages. It impacted thousands of travelers this week like Abrams.
"I was supposed to be here yesterday, but they canceled my flight at the last minute, like hours beforehand. so that was hassle. I had to be on the phone over two and half hours trying to get through.”
Others, like Efrain Acosta, were also visiting Cleveland for a wedding—jumping through hoops just to book a flight and check in.
"We tried to check in online, I kept getting an error message. It said you can chat with someone—you go to chat—there was no one to chat. It said, ‘I’m sorry.’ They give you a 1-800 number to call…you call that number, and you are literally waiting for two hours, and I finally gave up.”
Ted Christie, Spirit Airlines CEO said the company is working to address the issues.
“It's been a terrible week for us, for our guests. All the team members working super hard to try to get us back, back where we want to be."
Christie said the cancellations, unfortunately, aren’t over yet. And the company hopes to learn from this nightmare.
“There will still be cancellations over the next few days, a few days, but we can start to build back to the full operation, and then, and then build from the takeaways that we get from this last week,” Christie said.
Is my flight canceled?
To check the status of your Spirit Airlines flight, you can call 1-855-728-3555 or visit the airline's website here. If you're flying into or out of Cleveland, you can also check your flight status on Cleveland Hopkin's website, here.
RELATED: Spirit cancels half its flights on Thursday as travel woes enter fifth day
Download the News 5 Cleveland app now for more stories from us, plus alerts on major news, the latest weather forecast, traffic information and much more. Download now on your Apple device here, and your Android device here.
You can also catch News 5 Cleveland on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live and more. We're also on Amazon Alexa devices. Learn more about our streaming options here.
