Well they only have a few planes and a few flights, so it's not like they have a giant operation to support. Maybe the few people that need to travel to/from Columbus are all they need to make enough money to survive. Time will tell.

I happen to have family in Cincinnati -- I know people there often drive to Columbus to take advantage of cheaper fares, and I might do the same sometime when I go visit. The California airports they fly to, in any case, are hardly obscure -- OAK and BUR.

Ed

Wow, that will be great, you saved $100 on your flight but you pay $30 more a day for your rental car than a major airport because the rental company has absolutely no competition or incentive to provide low rates.

This is my favorite quote:
Can you imagine how this makes the investors feel, the ones who trusted this guy with their $160 million? They should have this guy committed now and cut their losses. :eek:

And from the article about Chicopee:
So besides paying more to rent a car in ___:confused:____, paying for checked baggage, paying for ..., you have to spend $80-$100 for the "privledge" to stay in Columbus overnight - just so you can save $50-$100 because you fly from (say) Chicopee to BUR instead of BDL to LAX, or Portsmouth to St. Augustine instead of BOS-MCO! :rolleyes:

Foreigners Stay Home Says Diffenderffer
 

Had a few corporate travellers who had thought they might actually try them, since they had to get to CMH almost immediately from another job-site. What's with the SkyBus attitude, since they don't want to issue a ticket to anybody without a US address (didn't some of the 9/11 gang have US addresses??? Makes great sense....)

A quick call to my Visa-issuing bank met with the response that they were less-than-pleased from the bank level that a merchant wasn't accepting their cards....and we all know how "happy" banks can get if they want to be displeased.

I think as time goes on and their frequencies improve, their problems will subside a bit. Especially if they have flights timed well for connections (and of course, allow them).

What will be telling about SX is how they deal with irregular ops. If they come anywhere close to following Ryanair's strategy of stranding people (refunding their cheap $10 or $50 fares and forcing pax to buy $300 tickets on later flights), they will be done. Skybus will get 10 times the negative press B6 got after the Valentines Day fiasco.

I think that pretty much sums up the business plan. :)

That pretty much looks to be the plan. $40 change fee, plus differential. No refunds, except when they cancel a flight. So if they get you to CMH just late enough that you miss your next flight, you're pretty much hosed. But they do encourage trip insurance...

Another little "extra" that is interesting is flight status alerts... $2 per segment. Nice. :td:

Sounds like they didn't take disabilities into account in their business plan...

I really cannot belive they did not take wheel chair pax into consideration. It seems like every other flight I am on has a wheelchair pax.

Response from Skybus
 

Since it is not everyday that the CEO will respond to his emails, I will give them the benefit of the doubt that this is a teething problem which will be rectified shortly and that customer service issues will be taken seriously (also not everyday the CEO shares his cell number in his email signature, which I have deleted out of courtesy from this public forum, but which does denote sincerity in being accountable and accessible) ---


I am eager to start selling Skybus tickets in Canada!!!! Our problem is just dealing with the technology issues with setting up our website to do those transactions. It is high on the list of improvements to our site. Starting up an airline is far more complicated than anyone can know who hasn't tried to do it. We will get this done soon. The last thing we want to do is discriminate against Canadians.
Please apologize to your audience on my behalf.

Bill

Bill Diffenderffer
CEO
Skybus Airlines, Inc.

This seems insane.

I always give entrepreneurs, especially in an industry as mature as the airline industry, the benefit of the doubt. That is, they must have thought through the no-phone-number plan, particularly in event of a snowstorm in Columbus, they must have done a cost-benefit analysis on the no-connections model, they must have subjected the screw-the-customer surliness to focus group tests, they must have studied the market (including in Columbus) and realized that their core customer was Ma and Pa Kettle, with all of their travel-savvy. Diffenderffer seems to be an industry veteran with a track record, not a crack-pot like this quote suggests. And $160M in funding shows some market confidence.

Still, I, like most of this forum, am extremely skeptical. I would never fly them (even if the fare were zero), but I hope that it succeeds, in which case I would applaud the innovation. But I would be shocked. I suppose time (possibly not much time) will tell!

Well, you can never say never. I remember being very skeptical about JetBlue's business plan (the revised one that actually launched). I thought that flying cheap transcons and flights to Florida was the graveyard of start-up airlines, and that their cheap fares were below their long-term unit costs.

But, amazingly, it worked! (at least for now). They built a following with their buzz, and people liked the frills. Sure, their fares WERE below their long term unit costs, but when Neeleman finally realized he couldn't afford to offer $49 flights to Florida and $69 transcons, the airline was sufficiently established that people WOULD pay more.

Of course, JetBlue was "risky." But this airline seems insane. I like to quote Gordon Bethune in these cases (who, FWIW, was also skeptical of JetBlue's business plan). First, Bethune would say you have to fly where people want to go. That ain't Columbus (as America West found out after hanging in for a decade). He'd also say you can make a pizza so cheap that nobody would want to buy it. That's seems to come into play here.

Hard to imagine that anybody actually invested their own money in this idea. I wonder how much diligence they did.

Of course it's only anecdotal, but this report supports the "consensus view" that it might be best to let others be the SkyBus guinea pigs this summer.

http://www.jaunted.com/story/2007/5/...Or+Headache%3F

In all the reviews I read about SkyBus they state "for $10 it was worth it" or some variation of that statement. The problem is only 10 seats per flight are sold for $10. Will it be "worth it" for passengers when the savings are not as great??