Frontier Hires A Wizz Air Executive As Two Leaders Walk Out

Frontier’s new COO comes from Wizz Air, and two senior leaders are headed for the exits with no explanation. More concerning, the customer chief is one of them.

A New COO Walks In, Two Execs Walk Out

Frontier announced Monday that Michael Delehant will join as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) on November 30, 2026 according to AirlineGeeks. He most recently ran operational and commercial activities as a group Managing Director at Wizz Air, and before that he was chief strategy and network officer at Vueling; he also held several leadership roles at Southwest. He will report to Frontier CEO, Jimmy Dempsey.

The other half of the announcement is the exits. Trevor Stedke, Senior Vice President of Operations, and Alex Clerc, Senior Vice President of Customers, will both depart on November 13. Frontier didn’t provide a reason for either. Not all departures have a “spending more time with my family” boilerplate announcement provided and there’s nothing wrong with that. But  it’s telling that the person running operations and the person in charge of customers are both gone, unironically about two weeks before a new operations boss shows up for work.

Everyone Else Gets A Bigger Desk

James Fenner, who has spent more than a decade at Frontier and was most recently Vice president of Revenue and Loyalty, becomes Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer. His job now covers pricing, revenue management, loyalty and network planning. Most of those make sense to me together with the exception of loyalty. Pricing and revenue management go hand-in-hand as does network planning. But with the Frontier getting a dedicated first class, and the loss of Spirit (so far), Allegiant/Sun Country merging, and the struggles JetBlue is facing and Frontier’s own revenue challenges – it feels like loyalty should be its own gig.

Bobby Schroeter becomes Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing the brand and customer experience. With the customers executive leaving, customer experience moves under marketing. I would have thought loyalty responsibilities would have fallen to CMO but I am apparently mistaken.

The Backdrop Is A $104 Million Loss

Frontier lost $104 million in the Q3 2026, compared with a $77 million loss a year earlier. Removing special items and the airline made $40 million on a record $1.36 billion in revenue. Matthew covered it the day the numbers dropped as a loss despite record revenue, and he found reason for optimism.

Dempsey took over after longtime chief, Barry Biffle, left suddenly in December last year and was named CEO in January. This CEO, on the job about 10 months, is swapping out the operations chief, the customer chief and handing the revenue chief and in essence reinventing the carrier. I want to applaud Dempsey for taking his time to evaluate before making such dramatic changes. Newly installed leaders often want their own people and to break from the past to do things their way and make their own mark. However, as long as it has taken to make these changes, many might have presumed that he felt he was able to make those changes with the current staff in place.

Why Wizz Air Matters

Hiring a Wizz Air executive indicates what Frontier thinks its future playbook is. Delehant comes from two low-cost European carriers, Wizz and Vueling, and those two airlines operate differently from each other and the market is different from Frontier. Vueling is owned by International Airlines Group, the same parent as British Airways, Iberia, LEVEL, and Aer Lingus. Vueling operates outside of the network carrier model with connections and oneworld partner feed but still benefits from the incredible buying power of IAG. Wizz does not.

But for those who have called the death of LCCs and ULCCs in the United States with the shut down of Spirit, the new Frontier could fly in the face of that. Further, as pointed out on this site before, based solely on flying people and things, Ryan Air might be the most profitable true airline (not loyalty program) in the world. It closed last year earning $2.4bn, and every carrier that placed above Ryan had a loyalty program and credit card tie-in.

One thing that has become very clear, is that first class in the United States simply must be offered to be successful. Frontier, Allegiant/Sun Country, and JetBlue have all added a first class product this year (JetBlue had Mint for long haul but its shorter haul domestic first class is genuinely new.) Spirit had just moved into this space too, separating its Big Front Seat product into a First Class cabin, then European-style Business Class (blocked middle seat) though the writing was already on the wall in Fort Lauderdale.

These changes at Frontier could foretell the future of the ultra low cost model in the United States, first class and all.

Conclusion

Whether Delehunt’s changes have the capability of increasing Frontier Airlines stock price will likely determine just how much further he goes. But he’s right to install his own leadership, and given the market segment, quite savvy to find executives with experience in the ULCC space and at least some overlap in the United States in Southwest Airlines. Frontier has a credit card, its loyalty division now shares a boss with revenue management, and a hub model at least in part so it’s not a like-for-like fit with Wizz or other ULCC models. But it’s not a miss either, and I am interested in seeing just how much of the Spirit vacuum Frontier chooses to operate.

What do you think?