This weekend Anne & I are headed off to San Francisco for a mini-break. This will be our first flight using the new Columbus airline Skybus, so I’ll be sure to give my two cents on the whole experience.
This will also be Anne’s first trip to San Fran, so it should be pretty exciting. I lived in Freemont, California as a child for about a year, so we visited the whole Bay Area back then. I also went out to spend Christmas there about 6 years ago when my Dad was working in San Jose and wasn’t able to come home for the holidays. It’s a very cool city, and I’m really looking forward to getting away for a weekend.
so how was it?
and HOW WAS SKYBUS?
I had a lot of fun in San Francisco. I’ve been before, but we managed to see a lot of the city in 4 long tiring days.
There’s a great big thread over on Columbus Underground where people have been sharing their skybus experiences. Here’s what I posted there:
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Done with the flight into Oakland. Really it wasn’t much different than any other plane I’ve been on. We spent about $26 (for 2 of us) on food & drinks, which was fine by me since our tickets were $50 each. One note though… they offer both sandwiches and wraps. Anne got a sandwich, and I got a wrap. Same price ($10) but my wrap was about half the size of her sandwich. Ugh. I was hungry too…
It was sort of nice to get to choose your own seat as well. The plane was about 90% full, so a few seats open sprinkled here and there. The attendants were nice. Never pushy with their food and merchandise.
The leg room seemed fine as well. I know some people were saying that they’re herding people into these things like cattle, but it really wasn’t any different than any other plane. Unless you normally fly first class or something?
I’ll definitely fly Skybus again. If I can land tickets for less than 25% of what they’d cost through another airline, then paying $10 for a sandwich and $2 for a Diet Pepsi is fine with me.
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Yeah, no car renting for us. There’s an airport shuttle (called AirBART) that loops between the Oakland airport and the Oakland Coliseum where you can hop on the BART and go anywhere in the Bay Area. The airport shuttle is $3 per person. To ride the BART to Powell St (Union Square, Theater District, Downtown) where we’re staying was another $3.50 per person. After that we purchased the 3-day Muni passes for $18 per person that gives us unlimited rides on the city-wide transit including the Trolleys, Streetcars, and Buses (doesn’t include BART).
After we pay to ride back to the Airport we’ll have spent $62 on transit for two people for four days. Much cheaper than a car rental, plus the costs of parking it at the hotel, plus tipping valets. Not to mention the headache of driving and parking here. That’s something I never want to go through.
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Returned home this evening. The return flight seemed a bit slower to take off, slower to serve food, and slower in general, but no more so than any other delayed flight we’ve been on. I think we arrived about 30 minutes late. No big deal.
My only complaint is that they must only stock food on the planes in the morning. Our flight home was the return flight of this plane for the day, and they had ran out of several of the menu items when we tried to order them and had to make substitutions. Bummer.
But again, I can’t really complain too much because we were flying home for $10 per person, and you can’t beat that.
A++++ for Skybus! Will fly again!
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One other thing worth noting. When flying Skybus you have the option to do an online “check-in” 24 hours before your flight. This is worth doing because it saves you the hastle of checking in at the airport and you can arrive and go straight to your gate.
When you want to do this for your return flight though you might have to plan ahead on how you’re going to print out your boarding passes online because even if you’re travelling with a laptop, you’re probably not travelling with a printer. Our hotel thankfully had a “business center” where we could use their computer and printer for free to print our passes out. If you stay someplace that doesn’t offer something like this you might have to find a local library or kinkos or some place where you can both access the internet and access a printer at the same time.
Here is my take:
We watched a woman with a #2 boarding pass get in the end of the #1 line and when it got bunched up at the front, just cut over to the front of the #2 line! How rude.
Flew to Oakland on Saturday and back to Columbus on Tuesday and had a great flight both times.
Second the review about the food. Although on our plane trip back, they were doing food from the front and the back, which meant by sitting in the middle we didn’t have much to pick from.
Watch for people cutting in line!
Also, saw people bringing on water and one couple bring on an entire meal, so they haven’t been too strict with those rules. Why you would feel you need to do this though is beyond me, because it seems they are making money off of selling food and other items, so you are really ripping off the company by bringing your own food & drink on board. Seriously, it isn’t very expensive if you are wanting to eat. And I personally would like to see Skybus stick around, so I hope they either enforce this more, or people get honest.
The flight attendants weren’t very pushy with the inflight sales. Not very many items to pick from.
We had a turkey sandwich and a turkey wrap. The sandwich is a much better deal because you get twice as much food. However, I thought the wrap was better tasting (although my husband didn’t really like his). I thought the turkey sandwich was pretty dry. Ditto for the cookie that was with it. The ‘fruit salad’ that came with the sandwich was a little bunch of grapes and a strawberry. The wrap comes with a small bag of chips and a cookie.
Our planes left pretty much on time. We just took 2 carryons each, which is really easy if you are going on a short trip.
You were allowed to use carseats as long as you paid to have a separate plane seat for your baby. If you didn’t, babies had to ride in your lap. I saw a lady using one, and the only downside was the person in front of the baby could not recline their seat at all. So if you are on a longer flight, you might want to pay attention to where you are sitting and who is around you.