Dear readers,
David Sunde, a co-founder1 and the CEO of the bus company Landline, is an airline network nerd at heart. When he started the company in 2018, he had a simple thesis that he formed after leaving his job as a planning director at Surf Air: as regional airlines retired 50-seat jets, the Big Four2 would want to replace airplanes with buses on the shortest routes, allowing them to retain much of their hub feed at considerably lower cost.
I’d say he was half right. As CRJ200s and ERJ 145s have disappeared, smaller communities have lost service. But, with a few exceptions, airlines balked at the bus-as-an-airline thing — even though at some facilities, Landline passengers clear TSA screening before the bus leaves for the hub airport, allowing it to pull into an airside gate, much like a plane would. Unfortunately, Sunde’s radical idea — that a bus could operate like United Express or American Eagle (under contracts with similar terms) — hasn’t gotten much traction. In the United States, only American sells bus journeys as if they were flights.
Now, Landline is changing its target market. While Sunde will take more capacity-purchase deals with airlines, Landline is increasingly selling seats directly to consumers on what’s perhaps the most the convenient airport shuttle ever created. Rather than pairing the journey with the airline fare, passengers purchase a standalone bus ticket to the hub, where they transfer to a flight operated by one of several airlines.
This week, Landline announced its most ambitious move so far. On Nov. 17, it will launch service at Sonoma’s airport with eight daily trips to and from SFO. The model is similar to Landline’s operation to and from Boston Logan, though in Massachusetts, buses depart and arrive in Framingham, about 25 miles away from Logan.3
In Sonoma, customers can arrive at STS 15 minutes before the bus departs to SFO. They check in at STS, drop checked luggage (bags are stored securely in the bus luggage compartment), and clear security.4
The bus, which has Starlink, deposits them airside at SFO about two hours later. As passengers walk to their gates, Landline will deliver their bags to one of four airlines — United, American, JetBlue, and Alaska/Hawaiian — all for just $55 each way.5 Kids 15 and under are free.
“You tell us what Alaska flight you’re on,” Sunde said. “We tell you which Landline fits your needs the best with the tightest connection. You book your ticket, and then when you show up, we have a common use system. We print your bag tags for you, take your bags, we pass them to Alaska in the hub, and you’re on your way.”
Did something go wrong?
Long-time readers may remember that I did an unpaid-for-credit project for Landline while I was in business school in 2022. I signed an NDA, but Sunde said publicly then what he wanted Landline to be: a quasi-regional jet replacement.
It made so much sense. Airlines still operate many very short flights to preserve hub connectivity, like Chicago-to-South Bend, Chicago-to-Milwaukee, and Los Angeles-to-Palm Springs. A bus can handle these routes in 2.5 hours or less, at a tiny fraction of the cost. If that bus arrived and departed airside, allowing passengers to skip the more time-consuming aspects of air travel, few people would be materially inconvenienced. And if the Landline bus could depart from a population center (say, downtown versus the airport) passengers might even prefer it.
Just as Sunde predicted, regional airlines retired many 50-seat jets, leaving some smaller markets with less service. Unfortunately, at the same time, nearly every U.S. airline promised Wall Street that it now had a premium product (even in economy) for premium-hungry passengers.
That second trend made things difficult for Landline. Buses don’t rank very high in the U.S. transportation pecking order. If you’re an airline executive charged with building a premium product, you might not take a chance with a bus company just because it’s cheaper than Skywest, since it wouldn’t mesh with your bosses’ premium vision.
When I asked how the premium trend affected business, Sunde told me that he considers Landline a premium product, and for a bus, he’s right. With 1-by-2 leather seats and fast WiFi, a Landline bus is not a Greyhound bus.
But airlines didn’t bite as he hoped. Landline has had few airline deals over the past seven years, with United (no longer a customer), Air Canada, Sun Country, and American. Yet among them, American is the only carrier to fully buy into the bus-replaces-plane shtick, with airside service and all. It has offered that in several markets, including Wilmington, Atlantic City, and South Bend.
While I don’t know about the P&L of American’s Landline experience, I can tell you (at least from the outside) that it probably wasn’t the greatest idea for the carrier, assuming American really wants to be a global premium airline.