I spent $399 on Frontier's 'All-You-Can-Fly' pass. Is it worth the hype?

As a person who takes many last-minute trips, I'm used to flying on budget airlines. I've traveled thousands of miles on JetBlue (my ride-or-die), TAP Air Portugal (amazing), Vueling (decent), Ryanair (can you tell I studied abroad in Europe?), French Bee (they lost my bag at Paris Orly for nearly a week) and Spirit (who among us wouldn't buy a $45 round-trip ticket to see Pitbull play in Nashville?). Yet Frontier Airlines didn't come across my radar until more recently.

The Denver-based low-cost carrier caught my attention last November when the company announced it would be launching the GoWild! All-You-Can-Fly Pass. Its premise was simple: Users can book unlimited flights for fares of 1 cent (plus taxes and fees). Summer passes, for May 2 to Sept. 30, started at $399 and are $499 until May 31. (After that date, the price will revert to $999, though Tyri Squyres, Frontier's vice president of marketing, said the passes may sell out entirely this month.) Annual passes, which are good for a calendar year starting May 2, started at $599 and are currently on sale for $1,999.

For Frontier, which carries around 25 million passengers annually, the pass is a remedy for a problem that many airlines face. "The real genesis of the pass is we're flying thousands and thousands of empty seats every day," Squyres said. "Why not give them to folks?"

Unlimited flight passes have, of course, been around for years. And while such programs are always enticing, they tend to go wayward. In the 1980s, American Airlines let a few dozen lucky people purchase unlimited for upward. In 2009, JetBlue launched a more modest monthlong that sold a little too well, which . The most comparable program currently on the market seems to be Alaska Airlines' limited , which launched in February 2022 and allows people to pay a flat rate for six, 12 or 24 trips per year within California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.