Skybus is not as bad as people make it out to be and pax are always relaying their experiences to others. Every SX flight Ive taken, Ive always been amazed at how informed the pax were about Skybus service and destinations. The airline needs more attention from customers to stay in business.....I challenge all FTers to try them out once. I bet that you would all be pleasantly surprised. Im not championing a switch from your loyal carrier and their FFP program by any means, but if they go where you're going...save some money and try 'em out!

I have yet to take a skybus flight but I have 4 round trips planned through the end of August. I hope I get to take them all and that Skybus stays in business !!!

I just got an email from skybus pushing back the flight time of flight 1105 from PSM>SGJ so it looks like they are doing some schedule tweaking.


-Ken

I have not flown myself but have coworkers and employees who have booked but were never actually able to take their Skybus flights (more than once) because of their, um "operational irregularities".

I do walk down to their gate area each time I fly NW out of CMH, just to look around.

The couple of times I've been down there the potential passengers didn't seem to be happy campers at all.

Not that they are really all that happier at my NW gates, but...

I have my first Skybus itinerary for next month and it looks like my flight has been cancelled (I haven't been notified by Skybus, but the flight is no longer on their website). For any normal airline, I'd call their rez office to inquire. But -- whoops -- no rez office! I presume there's an email address somewhere on their website that I can contact them with.

Once I "make contact," will I likely find intelligent life? For example. If I booked an evening flight that's been cancelled, with they allow me to change it to the next day's early morning flight (which still exists)? Or will I get grief because I'm "changing the date"? Any experience with Skybus contacts and schedule changes would be much appreciated. I'm curious to see how well they can handle such stuff.

You should get an email in the next day or so which will give you three options: 1. Get a Refund. 2. reschedule at no charge to another flight, or 3. stay with a flight they select for you. This assumes that your destination wasnt cancelled all together. And yes they do answer their email but it usually takes about 48 hours. IF you flight isn't for awhile sit tight.

-Ken

Thanks. I didn't get the email, but I entered my itinerary into the box on their homepage and those 3 choices popped up. It was very easy to rebook -- they give you a 5 day window for each cancelled flight.

Had I thought about it some more, I probably should have done nothing with this info and left the reservation hanging. That way, I could turn a non-refundable fare into a full refundable, changable ticket. Somehow I felt insecure though without a real rez. So I was a scaredy-cat and locked in.

just curious, what was your flight that was cancelled ?

-Ken

While everyone complains about flight irregularities, I think they just have more fun picking on Skybus because it's new and they dont have many backup planes to fill the void. But, they still want low fares too so they come back. These same operational issues often happen on other airlines too. It's interesting how everyone "loves to hate" the airlines and complain about them no matter what (especially the media!).

Skybus is very fast at answering email too IMO.

The rumor on the website of the Columbus ABC affiliate is that Skybus is going out of business at midnight. No details to the story yet, just a crawler at the top of the page.

http://www.wsyx6.com/

Article on the Columbus Dispatch Website

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content...4/skybust.html

It's official - http://www.skybus.com confirms they cease operations 4/5

8 planes still in the air, i wonder if they told the flight crew !

http://flightaware.com/live/fleet/SKB

Wirelessly posted (Treo 650: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D060; Blazer/4.5) 16;320x320)

Somehow you knew this was inevitable. With jet fuel as high as it is now the only way you can make enough money is by having someone be willing to pay full price for walk-up tickets. And if you're going to do that you may as well use a full service carrier with all the amenities.

More ASMs out of the picture though. This won't bode well for the travelling public.

Three airlines in a week! Any guesses about who is next?

FOUR: Skybus, ATA, Champion, Aloha

You da man. ^ Nice call.

Well, I'm not in the least bit surprised to see Skybus fail (a lousy business model), but I am surprised that they went out of business so suddenly. Heck, they're not even in Chap. 11 yet!

Oh well. So much for my first Skybus flight next month.

Yep, same here. I'm not going to gloat at those who have lost their jobs, but this airline is a huge "you really should have known this won't work" experiment.

But I have to admit, Wilmington/New Castle airport is closer to me than PHL :o

Yeah, I do certainly know about SX, AQ, TZ and Champion Air has been gone out of business with chapter 7. I'm surely what exactly they will gonna do for those passengers were trying fly back home. How exactly they will trying to get home from entire trip. I'm too ashamed what happened of Skybus has been cease operations. I am already informed some of those my friends from St. Augustine. Its has continuation gone into trouble the financial.

So, the silver lining in this is that the folks in BLI, who were disappointed when Skybus canceled service are lucky - no one is stranded en route.

A tough situation, but I think this is just the beginning of industry consolidation.

Well I just finished cancelling the last car rental. Called Amex and cancelled half of my skybus tix, called my other credit card to cancel the others. The amex charges were immediately removed. Also cancelled a hotel reservation.
Now to figure out what to do with all my new free summer time !

-Ken

US Air annouced they will sell 50 dollar standby tickets to passengers stranded by SkyBus through April 11th. At least some folks will get home without too much cost.
Its ironic, I have fought taking SkyBus for nearly a year now. Some friends
wanted to take a fishing trip in GulfPort in July. They talked me into the cheap
ticket. I kept joking the airline wouldnt be there for our, trip. This is one time
I wish I was wrong. I actually was interested in what the experience would be like
I was prepared to buy food, and even paid to board early for an exit row.

JetBlue is doing the same thing until April 13. Others will probably accomodate as well. It's a nice gesture given that most Skybus travellers weren't expecting to pay a lot for their transportation.

It's a shame that the accomodation window only lasts a week or so. I guess the idea is to get people home. I suppose they don't want to deal with $50 standby customers for months.

A friend of mine at work was going to fly on Skybus this summer out of Columbus. Damn, she will be pretty unhappy.

Actually, it is the RyanAir model, which works extremely well in Europe.

Well, there were some similarities to Ryanair, but also some major differences. For instance, their major hub is right outside of London, and they fly to places people want to go (major leisure destinations, large European cities, flights for London's foreign community to return home, etc). Ryanair also faced competitors with much, much higher fares, such that there weren't good travel alternatives.

Had Skybus set up shop in one of the largest US cities and flown to secondary airports where people wanted to go (like places in Florida, for example), they would have had a shot. But these were dumpy markets. I like both Columbus and the Triad, but these are not exactly vacation hotspots. Heck, in Columbus, after many unsuccessful years, Doug Parker pulled America West's hub even though (at the time) he was reinventing the airline as a true low fare carrier. At Greensboro, Continental's "Lite" low fare experiment proved a complete dud. As Bethune later remarked, they were flying to places where no one wanted to go.

So is anyone surprised that Skybus couldn't make a go of it where others (with slightly better business plans and more experience) had failed?

Not surprised. Their expansion was reaching a point where I thought they might have been able to fill enough seats to keep them going, but they never got there. Sucks for the cities that just lost all that service and the jobs, particularly CMH and GSO.

Yeah, especially because those cities suffer repeat failures. In addition to CO Lite, GSO had Eastwind a few years ago. CMH got de-hubed by America West. Indeed, it was that de-hubbing that made Columbus vulnerable to the salesmanship of Skybus' founders: "Look, you can be a hub again!"

Considering that America West -- which survived (without bankruptcy!) the onslaught of Southwest at PHX and LAS -- thought uncontested CMH wasn't worth their time, should have given "realists" in Columbus second-thoughts. Like most airline CEOs, folks like to give Doug Parker a hard time. But he's a smart businessman, and manages to keep his airlines solvent. This should have been a huge red flag.

But people like to dream. After all, some big Wall St. types were willing to invest. I guess the "smart money" can be pretty dumb, too.

No scheduled pax service seems to last at that airport: Shuttle America, Delta, Skybus...who's next?

Yeah, but this one was hardly Wilmington's fault. :) FWIW, I think Skybus was there for less than a month.

Wilmington service would work, but it would have to be the right type of service. Probably something like low fare, point-to-point to a place folks would want to go. Like Florida. Or maybe Boston (it's not that far, but a bad drive). With a ton of nonstop service just up the road in PHL (like 25 miles), you're not going to attract much interest with a couple of spoke runs on an RJ to a hub. Nor were you going to attract enough people with flights to Greensboro or Columbus.

technically 5
 

Skyway Airlines, the Midwest Connect partner, stopped flying on April 5 too... (This had been planned for a while, ALL of Midwest Connect is going to Skywest, instead of just some of it.)

I'm one of the stranded passangers
 

Well I got bit in the butt with the sudden closure of business of SkyBus ... I live in Charlotte and flew out of Greensboro on Friday afternoon to Chicopee , MA .. " unlucky me "

I was going up to Vermont to visit family and friends and found out about it late on Friday night ... I ended up calling US Airways to see about trying to use some airline miles to fly home or buy a one way ticket ... The person I was speaking to said it looked like US was going to try and help out passangers like they did with ATA and Aloha ...

In turn he has me going standby ( $ 50 friendly fee ) on a 8:30 am flight to Charlotte but of course I still need to get the 90 + miles up to Greensboro to get my car and drive back to Charlotte .... Of course who knows how many other peoeple are on stand by and when I will really get in the air ...

To be continued ..... :rolleyes:

Last night, I landed in Columbus on a United flight. I saw many Skybus planes parked all over the airport. They closed the entrance to Skybus' gate areas. I always wanted to try Skybus, but never had a chance to.

I feel bad for stranded passengers and employees of Skybus.

I started this thread before Skybus started operations and was excited about the new airline. I never thought that in only 23 pages of discussions over the period of less than 2 years that the airline would go under.

It is so sad to see four Skybus planes parked at their gates at Greensboro/High Point. The engines are covered for protection from the elements. What will happen to them in the short term...sit at GSO until someone buys them or will they be ferried somewhere?

It's incorrect to compare Skybus with Ryanair, who they only took a few elements of the business model from - and the wrong elements.

Ryanair, after a false start with commuter prop aircraft which nearly finished them off, got going on London to Dublin, a trunk route which was already one of the largest city pairs in Europe, with regulated service, high prices, and many passengers forced by price to use an inconvenient rail/ship surface route. What an opportunity. And they started with cheap jet aircraft leased from Romania, moving on to still well-used 737-200s. Growth was steady and only as funds became available from other operations. Only in recent years, once their brand image became well established with substantial growth of the business have they moved on to new aircraft.

Skybus on the other hand started off on city pairs previously unserved (previously unserved for a very good reason of course), running on investors money rather than generated funds, and with all the costs of brand new aircraft from day one. Quite different.

The question is now how many clueless consumers will still buy a ticket on Frontier (losing money continually for awhile now) or Spirit (privately held, no numbers released, but business model very close to Skybus and said to be unprofitable), get burned (if) the airline shuts down unannounced, and then get on CNN and complain because they showed up to the airport with no flight and/or stuck and having problems getting another carrier to take them home.

Also have to wonder about VS, but at least there are deeper pockets there.

That won't help people coming in and out of CMH, though... I loved flying JetBlue, but when they pulled out of CMH they became useless to me. Now I get to watch my points expire...

Deeper pockets maybe, but also better leadership as well. No point in sticking around if you're losing money...

Well, I hate to quote myself, but ya'll heard it here less than 6 months ago... it's a shame for the employees who are now out of a job, but overall this is a good thing for the industry.

From: http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs...TAFF/369006678