Travel&Vacation

Ed Perkins on Travel

By now, we’re getting used to the new startup airline du jour. Although most of them quickly fail, several, including JetBlue, AirTran, and Frontier, have shown some staying power, and a well-financed Virgin America plans to start flying in a few months. Wherever they fly, those lines generally help keep fares low. But for the most part, their product, pricing, planes, and scheduling have copied Southwest’s formula, itself copied from Pacific Southwest Airlines. But now, we’re seeing some really different business models in various stages of development, perhaps bringing the first real innovations in quite some time.

The boldest new proposal is Skybus, a low-fare line that will start flying from its base in Columbus, Ohio, this month. Initial once-a-day service in full-size Airbus 319s will be to Boston, Kansas City, and Los Angeles on May 22, Richmond on May 23, Greensboro, Ft. Lauderdale, and Seattle on May 29, and San Francisco on June 12.

Skybus will emulate Ireland’s Ryanair rather than Southwest as its model:

• Fares will start out at new lows, even for a U.S. low-fare line. At least some seats will be sold for $10 each way on the shorter routes and $40 or $50 each way on the longer trips. And Skybus assures me that it won’t violate the Department of Transportation rules against bait-and-switch pricing: “Adequate” numbers of seats will be available at those prices indefinitely.
• Skybus will charge extra for almost everything. You’ll have to pay extra for soft drinks and snacks, $10 for early boarding, $5 each to check the first two bags; $50 for each additional bag, even more for overweight bags.
• Seating will be ultra-tight, at 30-inch pitch (the front-to-rear spacing of seat rows). The only other U.S. mainline planes with seats that tight are Northwest’s DC9s and Hawaiian’s 717s.
• Where possible, Skybus will use secondary airports: Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for Boston, Burbank for Los Angeles, Oakland for San Francisco, and Bellingham for Seattle. Burbank and Oakland are conveniently located within their metro areas, but Portsmouth and Bellingham are a stretch.
• Although all initial routes will radiate from Columbus, Skybus doesn’t plan to run a traditional hub system of connecting flights there. If you want to fly, say, from Kansas City to Richmond, you have to buy separate tickets from Kansas City to Columbus and then from Columbus to Richmond, with no through-fare rate, and if you want to check baggage, you have to reclaim it in Columbus and re-check yourself and your bags (including, presumably, passing through security) for the connecting flight to Richmond.

Where will Skybus get its customers?

For starters, Columbus is a big city and a state capital, which automatically generates a fair amount of air travel.

Several sizable cities are within a two-hour drive of Columbus, including Cincinnati, Dayton, and Springfield, and super-low fares may well attract business from those and other nearby areas.

The lowest fares will probably be enough to attract a fair volume of travelers willing to put up with the baggage and second check-in hassles at Columbus to fly spoke-to-spoke at rock-bottom prices.

But, in my estimation, connecting hassles will discourage most high-value business travelers from using Skybus for any trips other than to and from Columbus. That means growth will have to come mainly through new routes.

If you want to speculate a bit about future targets, think about Chicago (Gary or Rockford), Houston (Hobby), Orlando (Sanford), New York (Islip or Newburgh), and Washington (Baltimore). All of those could generate a substantial volume of traffic to and from Columbus. You also have to think about connecting the spokes of the original route system: Burbank to Bellingham, for example, or Kansas City to Portsmouth. What we do know is that Skybus has ordered more than 60 planes, and it will have to add a lot more flights to make good use of them.

If you’re interested in flying Skybus, or just want to see what happens next, visit Skybus.com. You have to go online: There’s no phone.