I think the Viza Air name is appropriate. They’re trying to fly out of Gary, Indiana, so they could easily borrow Visa’s tagline and tweak it to say “It’s nowhere you want to be.” Maybe that’s not fair. At least Gary does serve the Chicago metro area. That’s better than I can say for Toledo. The plan is for flights to both Newark and Washington/National airport.

If you believe the airline reps, they say they have now secured slots at both National and Newark. If that’s true, then great. It’s better than JetAmerica has done. But I’m not such a quick believer. For what it’s worth, at least Gary is being smart about this one. They have been in discussions for a few months, but they still haven’t seen a business plan. Gary does make it clear that there won’t be any marketing funds offered here. They’ve been burned too many times by now.

So is there a need for this? No, I doubt it. I do like the idea of Gary in better economic times, but I would still focus on more leisure destinations like Florida than business destinations like DC and New York.

I actually touched on this possibility when I interviewed Virgin Blue CEO Brett Godfrey in February. When talking about Delta, he alluded to this . . .

You might say, well, does Delta want to put their traffic on Qantas in Australia? A lot of the market flies beyond Sydney, so maybe that’s an opportunity for us to say, well, quid pro quo . . . . There’s some opportunity there. No discussions held in that regard . . . but that’s an opportunity.

And here we are five months later with a deal in hand. This partnership will have frequent flier reciprocity, codesharing, and it will ask for antitrust immunity so they can discuss routes and fares. This seems like it should be an easy one for the DOT to approve, because up until this year, only 2 airlines flew the route. If this doesn’t get approved, my bet is that Delta’s days to Sydney are numbered, so there is a clear benefit to consumers to approving this deal.

It also allows Delta to feed people into Los Angeles from around the US and Virgin Blue to feed people into Sydney (and other gateways) from around Australia. I would hope that we’ll see some serious frequency cuts in order to try to get back to a more normal level of capacity on the route.

I was emailing with Dan Webb over at Things in the Sky last night about this, and he was very interested in what this means for Virgin America. This type of joint venture certainly diminishes Virgin America’s importance to V Australia. If it weren’t for space constraints, I wonder if V Australia would even rather move over to Delta’s terminal at LAX and leave Virgin America behind.

This also raises the question about what happens to the Virgin Blue/United partnership. Right now, Virgin Blue shares United’s code on flights beyond Sydney in Australia. I can’t imagine Virgin Blue would cancel this deal, but I wonder how United will feel about it. They may very well need the traffic, so it’s possible it could stay, but that would make for an odd arrangement.

I also find myself wondering if eventually Air France could join this agreement with its LAX to Tahiti flight. Virgin Blue subsidiary Pacific Blue doesn’t fly to Tahiti yet, but this could be another interesting twist.

I like this move. It should help to stabilize the routes between the US and Australia, though it should mean fares will rise for consumers. Considering that fares are too low to be sustainable right now, that’s a good thing.

My cousin and aunt flew from Oakland to Eugene last week, and my cousin sent me a copy of his itinerary with the fare breakdown. The basic airfare was $156 for two, but by the time they were finished, it came out to $387.40. Here’s the breakdown.

The government taxes and fees are standard, of course, so they should have expected to pay $196.40 on most airlines. But here’s where things start piling up.

• Prepaid Bags - Each of them brought one bag and they paid for it in advance. That’s $15 per bag each way for a total of $60.
• Seat Selection Fee - You can just get assigned a seat at the airport, but if you want to reserve one in advance, you’ll pay $13 each way per person.
• Priority Boarding - You will have your seat assigned by the time you board, so for $5 each way, you simply get to hop on early and claim your bin space.
• Convenience Fee - You’ll pay $14 per person to book online or via the phone. The only way to avoid this fee is if you buy your ticket at the airport. I’m not sure why it came out to $27 instead of $28 here.
• Trip Flex - For $15 per person, you can have unlimited name changes until the day before departure. If you don’t purchase this option, it will cost $50 per name change at a later date. This is unique to Allegiant since nobody else will let you change names at all.

As you can see, this adds up quickly. My cousin noted:

I think that a few of the fees we didn’t necessarily have to pay (eg - priority boarding, and checking bags if we had carried on).

I wondered about that and looked at the booking process myself. They do not make it easy to opt out of some of these fees, in particular the priority boarding and seat selection fees. The checkboxes come pre-checked, and if you click the small link to uncheck them, it pops something up suggesting that you really shouldn’t do that. So you really do have to pay close attention when booking on this airline to make sure you’re not paying more than you bargained for.

And this isn’t even all the money they can extract from you. This doesn’t include the cost of food and drink on the plane. They also ran a raffle onboard that I’m sure nets them some cash as well. It also doesn’t include the money they can make from hotel and car rental bookings. Even with all these fees, I think my cousin sums it up quite well.

I think that the price may have still added up to less than a regular United flight out of SFO.

It appears that my predictions were half right. Cincinnati is shrinking rapidly (including a recent cut of 24 daily flights), but Memphis is actually holding strong. Who would’ve guessed? Let’s look at some graphs.

Here you can see Cincinnati’s rapid decline. I looked at the number of daily departures on a random Wednesday during November for 2007, 2008, and 2009. During that time, the number of Delta/Northwest departures from the airport have been cut in half from 416 to 208. Mainline flights have dropped from 62 to 28, and now you’ll see mostly little 50 seaters buzzing around. Can it be much longer before the cuts continue? I think not.

Then we have Memphis. Check this one out.

Memphis has held strong. There are now only 203 flights compared to 221, but that’s a much smaller decrease than what Cincinnati has seen and it’s in line with the general capacity cuts we’ve seen around the system. It has lost a lot of mainline - 78 to 42 departures - but that is still a fairly large percentage of the total operation. Most importantly, Memphis has not seen a loss in the number of destinations served, so it’s really just a frequency reduction. Meanwhile, Cincinnati has seen the number of destinations served drop from 116 to 77. See for yourself.

So we see a mixed bag here, that’s for sure. Delta appears to be finding some level of success in Memphis while Cincinnati suffers from death by a thousand cuts.

[Updated 7/7 @ 1118a: Transposed Memphis departure numbers were fixed]

At left, you can see the edge of JetBlue’s traditional ticket counter. Southwest, as you can see, hired the Kool-Aid man to bust through some walls and open things up. (Oh yeah!) There are four podiums with scales on each side. Customers can walk through the ticket counter and go directly on their way to the concourse.

Where do the bags go? Southwest spokesperson Whitney Eichinger tells me that customers take their own bags to the CTX scanning machine around the corner. Ah, LaGuardia must not have inline screening. This, according to Whitney, is actually one of the reasons they came up with this concept. It allows customers to walk right through to the CTX instead of having to go the long way around.

Most airlines that have tried to create a new ticket counter environment have gone for this “walk through” style. Take Alaska and their airport of the future, for instance. The goal is to keep people going through the process instead of creating dead-ends. I just hadn’t seen Southwest try this before, and it looks like a great setup. Here’s another view.

So will we be seeing this elsewhere? According to Whitney, “This is not a template for all our other new cities, but I do think we’ll try and use parts of this elsewhere when it makes sense.”

US-EU Open Skies Phase II Talks Begin
All eyes are on round two of the talks - this, the EU hopes, will result in cabotage rights within the US.

United, Continental Antitrust Application Slammed by DOJ
The DOT was in favor of the broad antitrust immunity application, but the DOJ isn’t so happy.

Frontier Makes Money in May, What’s Next?
Frontier is making money, and that’s great, but it’s what happens next that really determines how this airline will be doing going forward. Lots of changes could be underway.

Boeing Set to Buy Vought?
Boeing seems to be having seconds thoughts about outsourcing most of the 787 part production, and it now appears to be bringing one of its suppliers back in-house.

This time, there actually is a person involved, but fortunately, he is fully clothed. Apparently, AirTran is really happy that Mark Malkoff made it through June without a hitch. This has been great publicity for the airline and its wifi efforts, and they’ve decided to commemorate the event with a giant picture of Mark, literally on AirTran.

That’s Mark’s wife, who appears to be rather happy to have her husband back despite the fact that he hasn’t seen a shower since May.

I hope everyone enjoys their 4th here in the US. (And for my British readers, I hope you aren’t still too bitter - it has, after all, been more than 230 years. You know we still love you.)

Could this actually be a glitch? I tried to call the reservations line, but I gave up after about 10 minutes or so. I have this picture in my mind of a phone ringing repeatedly at someone’s house, but they had fallen asleep so it just kept ringing. Anyway, Jaunted picked up the story last night, and they did get through. They were told by reservations that it was a server error. Yeah, right.

Anyone know what kind of server error just magically deletes a month of flights but otherwise functions perfectly? That’s what I thought. If the reservations system is to be believed (which I tend to think is more trustworthy than what we’ll get over the phone), August 14 will see the first flights from Newark to Toledo and Lansing as well as from Minneapolis to Toledo. (I wouldn’t bet on that Minneapolis date.) On the 15th, they’ll have their first flights from Melbourne to Lansing and Toledo. On the 16th, we’ll see their first flights from Newark to Melbourne and South Bend. I now have to wonder if anyone will be onboard.

Let’s all recall that this was originally Air Azul. That airline announced plans and then quickly imploded on itself. After John Weikle got involved, the airline became JetAmerica and the routes changed. People were probably already wary about booking after that happened, but they may have figured that with the brains behind Skybus working on this, it would at least get off the ground.

Now with service delayed again, would you even consider booking beyond that date? I know that I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t think about spending a penny until I see an airplane in the air on an actual flight with passengers. Something tells me that the chances of that actually happening has just dropped dramatically.

If you were booked on JetAmerica before August 14, I would call their reservations line right now and demand a refund. Of course, if they keep insisting that it’s a server error, well, you may have to wait. The good news about public charters is that the money is held in an account until you actually fly, so you should be able to get your money back.

[Original photo from penner42 via Flickr]

Update 7/2 @ 138p - “Server error” my ass. JetAmerica has now sent emails out to booked customers explaining that they can’t get slots in time (they sound very whiny) so everyone booked before Aug 14 will get a refund. I will post the full letter in the comments section soon.

Wanting to do something nice for them on their flight home to Philly, I emailed my PR contact at Delta as well as a friend who used to work there to see if I could get a message to the crew to try to thoroughly embarrass Quinn and Jeanine over the PA or maybe even get them a celebratory drink. What resulted was far more than that. Check out the gift basket that was awaiting them onboard their flight from Salt Lake to Philly.

Now this can’t be normal, right? That’s a really nice gift basket (and it was definitely welcome as they waited out their 1.5 hour mechanical delay), but I can’t imagine Delta does this for everyone. Still, I do understand that they will usually offer champagne for some special occasions, and that’s a great policy to have. It can only engender loyalty during a very memorable and emotional time.

So thank you to Delta for such a nice gesture, and more importantly, welcome to the family, Jeanine!

Volaris is now flying a single daily trip from LAX to Toluca (outside Mexico City) and another one to Guadalajara. They’ll be starting flights to those cities from Oakland as well, and at the press conference yesterday, Volaris Managing Director and CEO Enrique Beltranena (bottom left in the picture, though I’ll certainly understand if you’re distracted by those flight attendants) announced that they had just received approval to fly from Oakland to Tijuana as well. He also said that he expects Volaris to be flying to more than 10 cities in the US in the next two and a half years. So this is no small plan.

How the heck are they planning on being the first successful low cost carrier flying between the US and Mexico? A huge part of the plan is the Southwest codeshare that was announced earlier. In fact, it’s such a large part of the plan that Kyle O’Neil, Southwest’s Director of Alliances (the tall, white dude in the middle of the picture) was there at the podium today for the event.

Of course, the question on my mind was whether or not the codeshare was still proceeding as planned, especially considering that the WestJet deal had been delayed. So, I asked them to elaborate on details. Kyle said that Southwest was still planning to launch the codeshare in 2010, but he couldn’t announce a date. Original plans were for the codeshare to go on sale in early 2010, so this looks like there might be a little slippage in my mind. But Kyle reiterated that they were very committed to the partnership, something that was evident by his mere presence at the event.

For Volaris, I imagine the codeshare can’t start soon enough. They are coming off a disastrous traffic plunge in Mexico following the swine flu outbreak that began in April. Enrique admitted that Volaris has been suffering, but he said that he believes Volaris was the only airline in Mexico to be breakeven over the last six months. (Warning: He answered that question in Spanish, so I’m trusting that my Spanish skills haven’t failed me.)

In the end, Enrique presented a very nice plaque (at left) to LAX commemorating the start of their service. He said that they’ve presented this to each city they fly as a symbol that they intend to be there for a long time. I like the symbolism.

So Volaris is pushing ahead, and LAX is a huge part of their commitment to making flying in the US work. They will be flying out of Terminal 2 here at LAX (convenient since Northwest flights all moved to Delta’s terminal yesterday), and while it’s not going to provide connections behind security to Southwest, it will at least be right next door.

What might you expect to see onboard? If you’re looking for legroom, you won’t find much. I’m told their A319s are equipped with 144 seats while the A320s have 172. For comparison, JetBlue’s spacious configuration has only 150 seats on an A320, but I think Volaris’ configuration makes sense for the airline. They do have leather seats and overhead TV screens, so the product is still quite nice. (You can see a photo of the inside of their aircraft on airliners.net.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing offered by Volaris is unique in this industry. As Enrique said (to many laughs), “We guarantee on-time performance or your money back so I hope your airport delivers.” That’s right. If your flight is late by more than 30 minutes, you get your money back, regardless of the reason for the delay. As a marketing campaign, I love this idea. It will certainly stand out and it’s a huge differentiator. On the other hand, remember why Domino’s dropped their 30 minute guarantee? They had drivers getting in accidents because they were rushing to beat the deadline. I really hope we don’t see any pressure on pilots to beat the deadline here. That makes me a little nervous.

Overall, it was a good event at LAX. Enrique seems like a very smart man, and he’s already built an airline that not only has to be the frontrunner of the low cost carriers in Mexico, but is also a great place to work. In fact, the biggest smile I saw from him all day was the one he let out when he was introduced as leading an airline that has been recognized as one of the top places to work in Mexico.

Would I try them if I were heading down to Mexico? Absolutely. And the low fares that they’re trying to bring into the market should help them stimulate additional traffic, assuming the burdensome taxes don’t overwhelm their efforts. I tend to think this can work, but this is not exactly the ideal time to be trying it. Still, they pushing ahead at full speed.

So what’s next for Volaris? Well, there was some pressure from LA officials for the airline to start service to Ontario as well (which is operated by the same folks that run LAX), but Enrique responded that “there is nothing more we would like to do than start service to Ontario. So if we are able to, and you are able to reduce the cost of the airport . . . .” Ah, smart man. Keep an eye on these guys, and if you have the chance to fly them, let me know your impressions.