PG: How do you pick your routes now?

BB: We’re adding a lot of routes. And we’re adding a lot of cities. Because we’re young as a company, in a sense. And we’re leveraging and using our low-cost structure and our very low fares to expand into markets where the fares have gotten very high.

So here’s how we pick where we fly. We pick a market where there’s already people flying from– from their A-to-B, but where they’re payin’ too much money, we think.Or where they’re payin’ more money than we need to make a good margin for our investors. So we say, “We’ll serve that market. We’ll lower lower the price. And we’ll put in enough capacity to carry the growth.” We don’t want to take any of the traffic off any other airline. We just want to grow our own business and run with it

Let me give you an example. We started flying from Dallas to Chicago a coupla years ago.

PG: That’s almost suicidal. You’re going from one major airline hub to another major airline– you’re going from fortress to fortress.

BB: That’s right. But 1,000 people a day were flying that route, paying an average of over $200 a day. We could break even at that route at well under $100. We could make a good return for our shareholder charging just a little over $100. So we went into that market and we lowered the prices. The market grew to 1,400 people. So now there’s 400 people more flying, we fly two flights a day with 150-seat planes.

We had industry analysts and others come to us and say, “Why are you flyin’ a route like this? That’s not really your strategy. Aren’t you a leisure carrier?”

Our view was, there’s leisure traffic in every big market. Sometimes there are prices that allow them to fly and sometimes there’s not. And Dallas to Chicago, they were all priced out.

PG: The traditional response to you going to that market would be for your competition max the Spirit fares because they can lose money longer than you can.

BB: That would be the traditional response. And that has been the traditional response when an airline fears for their traditional customer base. For example Virgin America’s having more challenges than we are, in the sense that of that more typical reaction.

Because what does Virgin America do? They they market a very nice product on board. They these super business-class seats. They’ve invested in this really nice cabin. Their billboards say, like, “Fly like a rock star and pay like a roadie,” or something like that.”

Spirit is not saying that. We’re saying we want the traveler or the family who’s priced out of the market . And we say, “Let’s re-price that traffic into the business.” And we fly out once or twice a day. So the physical product we offer, the level of fare that we offer and the level of frequency we offer, is for budget not business travelers.

PG: So no rock stars for you, just the roadies?

BB: Just the roadies. And there’s probably the rock star or two who– who understands value and says, “I’ll buy a better amp.”

For more information about Spirit, check out:

• Supreme Court Upholds Passenger Rights, Spirit Sues
• DOT’s New Passenger Rights Rules
• Airline Fee Transparency Debate: CEO Ben Baldanza Responds

By Peter Greenberg for CBS News