Lesson Learned

There's a new no-frills, cheap airline called Skybus. They have 10 seats on each flight for $10. The problem is that they don't do true connections between cities. And they fly to/from mostly small airports.

My inlaws flew on Skybus over the holidays with no problems. We picked them up at the "Boston" area airport, which is really Pease Tradeport in Portsmouth, NH, where the terminal is the size of a trailer and parking is free!!! We were planning a trip to visit the inlaws in late April for school vacation, so we thought we'd try them out.

The cost of flying any other commercial airline was about $457 each plus all the fees. The cost of flying on Skybus was only about $240 each, so for a family of four, this was significant savings. We booked the tickets several weeks ago. We were going to leave Portsmouth NH for the Jacksonville area (the St Augustine airport, to be exact). We'll rent a car and drive to Uncle E and Aunt M's house just north of Jax, spend a few days so they can meet Sophie, and then drive across northern Florida to Grandma and Grandpap H's for the rest of the week.

The flight home was a little bit of a challenge. Because they don't fly direct to Portsmouth from the area, we were going to take a flight to Winston-Salem/Greensboro, have a 4-5 hour layover, and then take a flight back to Portsmouth. Remember, they have no true connections, and many of these flight segments only run once a day, but hey, we were going to save about $1000, so it didn't seem like too big of a deal.

Two days ago, we received an email saying that Skybus is terminating service between the gulf coast and Winston-Salem, so they were refunding us for that flight segment. Of course the problem was that we still had tickets to go from W-S to Portsmouth. How the heck were we going to get there? And because of the no-frills airline, they wouldn't refund the tickets for the second segment. To top off the frustration, Skybus doesn't even have a phone number to call to plead your case, you do all communication via email.

So, we started looking for other options. We can get from the gulf coast to W-S on another airline for $94 each, but when we went back to buy them today, the cost was $350. We found another inexpensive option that meant we had two layovers and a 7 HOUR LAYOVER in W-S. But for only about $40 more, we can get all the way home, to a different airport. And we'll have to pay a limo service to get us home, since our car will be elsewhere, but I don't care at this point.

SOOOOOOOO...the point of this post is:

• If you're considering Skybus, do it for direct flights only.
• Consider the fact that if there's a problem with the plane or a weather delay, you can't just be put on another flight an hour later...you might have to wait an entire day.
• Travel insurance wouldn't have necessarily helped with our scenario, because we still needed to get to W-S to make the "connection".
• I've now spent as much money as I was going to spend to fly a REAL airline anyway, but I really don't need the stress and frustration in planning what is supposed to be a relaxing time away from home.