I love covering new airline startups, because the chances that most of them go anywhere are slim to none. It’s fun to pick these apart and to see if anyone actually puts money into them (see: JetAmerica). The latest effort we have is called Viza Air, and I’ll bet this one doesn’t go anywhere at all.

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.

You know all those low fares we’ve seen on US to Australia routes lately? That’s because with two new entrants, there’s way too much capacity out there and everyone involved is bleeding as they fight for traffic. Now, those two new entrants, Delta and V Australia/Virgin Blue have decided to get together a form a joint venture. Smart move.

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.

We’ve talked a lot about how much money Allegiant is able to make on ancillary revenue, but for those who haven’t flown the airline, I thought I’d give you some insight into how they pull this off.

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.