The folding of American budget-airline Skybus-based locally out of Columbus, Ohio-represents a potentially major loss in cheaper airline tickets as the cost of travel continues to increase. The Miami Student editorial board believes that the lack of even a small budget airliner has a negative effect on students and other individuals who need cheaper means of domestic travel. Additionally, the business model for Skybus should have been re-examined and adapted since its conception.
While the collapse may have been in the cards last month when former Skybus CEO Bill Diffenderffer left the company in order to pursue a writing career, the main fault can be blamed on a business plan that had hoped for major financial backing following a minimal-$3 million-initial investment. Even as Skybus had hoped to capture the same types of travelers as European innovator RyanAir has so successfully done, Skybus failed to understand the crucial market differences between U.S. and European short-range flight markets. Coupled with rising costs of jet fuel, the plan to expand service to such hot-spot destinations as Mississippi and North Carolina is not quite the same as RyanAir choosing out-of-the-way airports around Europe that are still geographically close-and logistically linked-to each other.
The end of Skybus also saw a company so bare bones that the only way to reconcile a now useless ticket that you may have purchased before the fold is to take the initiative yourself and erase the charge directly through your credit card company. The inability or unwillingness to resolve outstanding ticket issues with passengers may force us to be cautious in the future should another budget carrier spring up.
The major problem, however, is the overall lack of cheap domestic airline flights. While companies like Southwest attempt to innovate passenger airlines, they only succeed in marginally reducing the cost of overall travel. As the country that was a major player in launching the aviation movement, it is a sad state of affairs when U.S. consumers are unable to have a breadth of companies that offer cheaper service. The recent failure of Skybus illustrates the need of good overall market conditions to coincide with a smart business plan that is able to quickly and strongly solidify multi-million dollar investments.
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