Yeah, but every airline does this. If a pax uses a majors's res line or God forbid strays into an airport to talk to someone with a pulse that can fog a mirror, they wack them for a $20-30 ticketing fee. And for that matter, why not kill the $15 bag fees, and just incorporate it into the cost of the ticket by calling it a surcharge, whatever? At the end of the day, it's still a ton less then the majors. Safer, as reliable? Ah, probably not, but cheaper, yes. And Joe Sixpack loves that.

 

Guess his Skybust lesson wasn't enough, because he's coming back for more punishment. This guy likes to lose money. Idiot.

 

He didn't lose money on Skybust, the board bought him out before he had a chance to, then put the mad hatter looking guy in as CEO.

 

You are all missing the most important question.... what they plan to pay their pilots

 

nothing I read so far says hiring his own people at least for the first year they are using Miami Air for planes and pilots.

 

The Cranky Flier has a good summary and send up of this CHARTER (for now) airline.

http://crankyflier.com/2009/05/27/je...s-toledo-base/

The only reason they're doing anything is that they've managed to get 3 or 4 cities desperate for air service to pony up about $3 million in taxpayer funded incentives to pay for the thing.

Skybus had a plan, funding, and a fleet growth model (however flawed). This looks more like an outright scam to fleece the taxpayers. Yikes. Whatever it is, it's not another Skybus, Virgin America, or JetBlue wanna-be.

 

How do people this stupid, bumbling morons mange to become so wealthy???

 

Even in the biggest economic slowdown since the great depression there's still people lining up to start up an airline. Just amazing.

 

I understand the phone line charge and the in person charge, but a web based charge? How do you just buy a 9 dollar ticket? It's like Ticket- master's "service charge."

 

Ticketmaster might be a poor choice. They're a middle-man company that connects consumers to venues. The service charge is their piece of the pie to pay for ticketmaster's existence. Now, why this isn't just built into the price of the ticket is similar to this...

If you haven't noticed, the airlines are relying on ancillary fees which "de-couple" the charges that are normally lumped into the price of the ticket. The plus side is that if you don't want to pay for something (a free soda, for instance) you don't have to and therefore safe money.

The downside is that it can really **** off your customers. You can theoretically have a free ticket on an airline but then charge cutomers for everything (fuel surcharge, safety system surcharge, pilot-usage fee, etc etc). It's simply marketing the low ticket price. If you buy a ticket, first thing you look at is the price shown. The fee's attached after you select the flight are usually not considered by the flying public. So if you can't raise cash by raising fares, if you use hidden fees and ancillary revenue during the flight, you can make it up.

So to sum it up, up until now the airlines have asked for fees on take-it-or-leave-it items like soda and bags. JetAmerica is taking it one further by asking for fees for things like buying tickets. You can't get around the fee but it makes for the awesomely-low fare of $9. Nobody cares that they tack on fees that you can't get around afterwards.