Originally Posted by
TheMane
What's with all the "Oh, they don't have this!" and "They'll never succeed, they don't offer adequate customer service!" and "Point-to-Point? That's a pain!"
What exactly do you think "no-frills" means? It certainly doesn't mean a customer-service-oriented business approach. This airline will thrive off of the market of people who just need to get places and aren't seasoned air-travelers with frequent flyer miles and expense accounts.
$10/segment + $10/taxes = $20 per segment total... i'm talking $80 round trip flights including taxes if you're not flying out of Ohio, half that if you are. HALF THAT. $40 round trip. College kids cram 6 of themselves into honda civics and drive for 18 hours straight to get that sort of cost per person. If SkyBus is half as comfortable as the middle seat in a Civic, it's worth it -- and a heck of a lot faster too.
...and predictable fares too, none of this $10-$400 price shifting over the course of 5 hours. I, for one, am looking forward to the new player in the game.
There are 10 seats per flight at 10 bucks. If you can snag one of those, God bless you. It will obviously be "a deal." A deal Skybus will lose money on (I assume they're doing it for promo reasons).
Once those seats are sold, the fares -- at least to the West Coast -- seem to jump to $50 each way. Certainly a deal, but not much better than the type of "junk fares" we see every day on the mileage run board.
And it's not like they plan to offer a lot of $50 fares, either -- they couldn't, nobody could make money at that price. Even the most efficient low cost carriers are going to have a CASM (cost per available seat mile) of about 8 cents these days (Southwest's this quarter was 9 cents, JetBlue 8.5 cents, and AirTran 9.5 cents). So flying you 1500 miles (say to the West Coast from CMH) is going to cost them about $120. For every one-way fare below that, they have to sell a fare above that, so each $10 fare has to be off-set by a $330 fare + tax -- assuming EVERY seat is sold! How many people are going to pay $330 each way to fly SkyBus? What about $190 + tax (to compensate for the more plentiful $50 fares)? Seems doubtful to me.