Sun Country Airlines, a Minneapolis-based carrier specializing in carrying passengers from northern climes to, well, Sun Country has a new wrinkle: Using buses the way other airlines use regional jets to get passengers to its hub.
The airline is teaming up with Landline, a bus company that already connects smaller regional airports to Minneapolis-St Paul airport with scheduled daily service. Sun Country will now sell tickets from Duluth and Mankato to all its regular destinations; passengers will check bags and get boarding passes when they board the bus, but will still have to go through security when they get to the airport.
If the trial works out, Sun Country has its eye on other airports that feed passengers to MSP, but not enough to justify jet flights. They include St. Cloud, Brainerd, Eau Claire and other regional cities.
Of course, some of us who have been bussed from terminals to small planes out on the tarmac have always wondered if we were traveling the distance by bus rather than plane…
The are learning from Amtrak