We have entered a new era in airline booking with the creation of YACA (another cheap airline) – Skybus, operating from all locations, Columbus Ohio. I mean no disrespect to the city, where parts of both sides of my family once lived before everyone retired to Florida or Las Vegas. And I wish this new entry the best, even if they don’t fly anywhere near where I live.

There are several interesting things about Skybus. First of all, their website is modeled after EasyJet and Jet Blue and has a good booking engine where you can quickly find out which flights are available at what price. I call this Strom’s First Airline Booking Law: A customer wants the ultimate in transparency and ease of use when it comes to finding the cheapest fare. Sites and airlines that get it right will be successful. It is not enough to know that I can find the cheapest seat, but that I can be reasonably sure that the seat I buy today will still be a good deal next week as well.

I like the calendar view that Skybus and EasyJet use, but I also like how Southwest shows you flight prices the day before and the day after your initial query. If you have some flexibility in your journey, it’s very easy to use.

Other travel booking sites have started to do some interesting things with airline booking system search, and the one I’ve come back to more than once is Kayak.com. It takes some learning to figure out how to weed out and zero in on the flights you want to take, and I’m not sure of its entire fare universe, but for trips where you have to connect and could use a variety of hub cities, it has a lot of promise. .

My second point about Skybus is that you can’t call them – the operators are definitely NOT ready to take your booking, they are 100% internet only. If you have a problem, send them an email. I think this is great until you have a problem and need someone to fix it. And time will tell if they respond via email.

We all have our horror stories about air travel, especially after this winter, and I’ll be sharing one of mine here with Flying United. One of the things I’ve learned about United is that their call center is really mediocre. Clearly they have outsourced this overseas, and the level of expertise is definitely lower than what I have seen at other airlines. About a month ago, I ended up sitting on the tarmac here in St. Louis, knowing that I would miss my connecting flight in Chicago. So I get on the phone and see if I can at least wait for a seat on the next flight out of Chicago. The call center people, and I tried several times, were spectacularly unhelpful, even going so far as to say that the connecting flight was sold out. Of course, when I got to O’Hare and caught the next flight, it was nearly empty and I had no trouble finding a seat.

But I will never fly United again, if I have a choice. Now trying to project that experience with Skybus, they still need something for passengers who are delayed. Maybe in downtown Columbus they have a lot of terminals that you can access I haven’t been there so I can’t say but what if you have problems at your remote airports where the internet connectivity isn’t that great and there is only one flight per day?

My third point is that Skybus is also being transparent about charging for things beyond the space your body occupies on their planes. Want to board early so you can get the seat of your choice (they don’t assign seats, Southwest style)? Do you want to check in a suitcase? Change your ticket? They are candid about these charges, although they could do a better job of listing them all in one place on their site. They’re also candid about oversized passengers who should book two seats, but usually don’t. Having sat next to quite a few of these people who “compromise any part of the seat next to them” (a wonderful phrase from your site), I wholeheartedly applaud this. One nit: golf clubs are not charged extra, but bicycles are.