Skift Take
It's hard to think of the bus as a disruptive form of mass transportation. But who knows? Maybe this company, Landline, will revolutionize how Americans buy airline tickets.
As network planners at Alaska Airlines charged with where the carrier would fly and when, Ben Munson and David Sunde sometimes identified smaller communities that were ripe for air service, only to realize their employer didn't have the right airplane to profitably fly the route.
Out of that shared frustration came a business plan. The two entrepreneurs, who did not overlap during their stints earlier this decade at Alaska but shared the same general concerns, decided to start a bus company that would function like a regional airline. Their company, called Landline, intends to shuttle passengers on behalf of the airlines from the smallest markets to nearby airports, where they can catch a flight. They think they can sell their service for bus routes of just 50 to 250 miles, with the price of the bus ticket becoming part of the overall ticket price for the flight, much like a connecting leg of a trip.
Similar operations have been around for decades, and Lufthansa still has robust bus routes in Europe. In the United States, however, plane-to-bus connections have fallen out of favor this century. Continental Airlines and United Airlines, as separate companies, had bus routes into the late 1990s, but canceled them outright or replaced them with the smallest regional jets. Munson and Sunde, who call themselves students of "ancient" airline schedules, say they've identified one current bus route from the Big 3 U.S. airlines — United's Allentown
