Ok, now that we have heard from the peanut gallery, lets take a moment to here some comments from someone who actually works for Song.
I am not going to sit here and say that Song is going to take over the world and beat Jetblue to oblivion, but I will make some educated comments, unlike the false ignorant assumptions I have heard on these boards.
First of all it is not fare to look at the loads yet and say that Song is doing poorly, I work in the operation every day at JFK and I can tell you first hand that we are pretty busy. We just added Orlando on May 10 and previous to that we only had 2 flights to PBI. It is important to realize however that effective APRIL 1 2003 Song employees (ex-delta) took over the operations of the Delta express flights and the DLX flights are transitioning to Song flights. The Song load factors are from reservations made months ago, when these flights were delta express, so if they are low, its because no one wanted to fly Delta.
Second most people don''t know that they are flying on Song, we are in the process of contacting DLX passengers to let them know that they are flying on Song, but since we have not launched our marketing campaign (it will be launched in the summer of 2003) most people still don''t know what Song is, but that all changes when they fly with us, even when they fly on DLX the Song employees are extremely friendly, motivated, helpful and we have a sense of humor, yes an x-delta agent can have a sense of humor and an x-delta flight attendant can be friendly. Even without the TV''s installed, passenger love our aircraft and our terminals. Yes I have heard nasty comments, some people don''t like being treated like a human, and they will go back to Delta and American, but the bulk of the passengers that we encounter love flying with us, they are treated with respect, they are given choices, they enjoy the comfort of our seats and they still get low fares.
I am not going to be naive and say that Song will last forever, but I will say that Song is not like Metrojet and COlite or even like Delta express, we are more than just a mainline planes with the first class cabin ripped out. These other low fare subs failed because they focused more on cutting costs, than serving the customer. Song places tons of emphasis on customer service, something Delta did not even do, so comparing Song to metrojet and COLITE is like comparing target to k-mart they are not the same thing.
I don''t know if Song will be the next failed attempt to form a low fare sub, but one thing is for sure. Delta realized that 30% of its revenue came from northeast to Florida and they realized that they were losing money competing with jetblue so they decided to do make an attempt to start saying money. Yeah people are going to say it wont work, but I think that if anyone can make this airline work delta can, and I have faith that Song will be successful.