Spirit knows it sucks, so it's giving away 1 billion free air miles

Spirit Airlines is so used to hearing customers complain about legroom, delays, unexpected fees, and statistically rude flight attendants that it's now offering 1 billion free air miles to absolve itself of awfulness. Well, at least the airline's trying, anyway.

Giving out 8,000 miles per passenger, Spirit's "Hate Thousand Miles Giveaway" isn't a large-scale apology, but rather a way to get fliers to purge their hatred and learn to love the company. Sort of like Healy learning Russian in Orange is the New Black.

“We want to change the way people think about air travel and educate them about the Spirit way of traveling”, Ben Baldanza, Spirit’s CEO said in a press release. “We’re going to Hug The Haters. They can share their frustrations with flying, and in return, we’re going to give them 8,000 FREE SPIRIT® Miles*, which gets them very close to an award flight".

To enter, you'll need a FREE SPIRIT account, and have to defy grandma's advice to not say anything at all if you can't say anything nice.

Instead, you'll need to send a hate message of no more than 140 characters about Spirit, or another airline, to this website. Though if you're one of the rare people who like Spirit, it'll let you say something nice, too.

Within 10 days of entering, you'll get 8,000 miles in your FREE SPIRIT account, which you can also redeem with existing points, if you have any.

Just one caveat: The minimum number of miles needed to pay for a one-way Spirit flight is 10,000. Unless you're a Spirit World MasterCard holder (which you're probably not), you'd need an additional 2,000 miles to actually get anywhere. Anyone else will have to cough up the additional miles and pay for the return flight.

A bit of a Catch-8,000, if you will.

To enter, head over here. And for more information on the promotion, which lasts until July 31, watch the video below, replete with an acoustic guitar and an annoying singer who encourages "letting go of your hate and embracing your inner saver". It'll also probably fuel your hate message quite nicely.