Skybus to cut flights?

Aviation Airlines
1

The “Columbus Dispatch” (whose parent company is a primary investor in Skybus, BTW) reported this week that Skybus inadvertently posted their March 2008 flight schedules - which show that the flights to SAN, BUR, and BLI will be discontinued.

According to sources, the flights are selling well, but the airline makes more profit overall by flying the shorter routes to places like Richmond and Greensboro (the latter has the highest load factor and profit margin in the system).

Here’s a link to the USA Today story (the paper for people who don’t like to read :slight_smile: ) - the “Dogpatch” site requires registraton.

blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2007/10/s … -cut-.html

2

that was to have “full size” jets availble for the Gso focus city

3

There has been more information made available since I originally posted…

Out of CMH, the single round trips to BLI and SAN plus one of the two BUR flights will discontinue “for the time being” 1/6/08. A daily round trip to BUR and OAK will remain.

According to a later article (which I can’t find now :frowning:) GSO -was- part of the reason - they’ll generate a great deal more money using a plane on several shorter segments per day out of CMH and GSO that they can flying the longer routes for a couple of round trips a day. GSO and the New England-Florida runs were moved up in their business plan timetable as a result - as were two of the four new routes starting up out of CMH in the same time frame.

Their pricing is not terribly distance-sensitive - you can fly three times as far in on a given leg but you can’t generate three times the revenue in doing so. Higher-than-expected fuel costs only emphasized this.

4

im a 45 minute drive away from gso

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CMH-BLI takes a lot of fuel, it’s hard to pay that fuel bill when you’re only charging around $100/seat. Much easier to cover fuel costs when you’re only going to Florida, New England, or GSO.