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Hawaii: New go! flights to Molokai & Lanai

L.A. Times Molokai photo gallery The upstart airline go! just can’t get enough publicity lately, it seems. The one-year-old discount airline is famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for its outrageous sale fares on inter-island flights, recently starting at just $1 (excluding taxes and fees). However, many go! sales are over, or the cheap seats are sold out, long before most people hear about them. Now, for a change, here’s some inter-island flight news that won’t expire within mere hours or days.

Deal: Starting in July, go! plans to offer discount inter-island flights to/from Lanai and Molokai. Although many details haven’t been announced yet, the flights will most likely depart from Honolulu and possibly Maui and Kona (Big Island). These additional routes are slated to be a code-share partnership with Mokulele Airlines, which currently operates charter flights to Lanai and Molokai.

Have you flown go! yet? Tell us how your flight was by posting in the Comments section below.

More…details: What the schedules and fares for these new go! flights will be is anyone’s guess, but I’ll let you know more as soon as I do. In the meantime, keep checking the go! website or sign up for the airline’s promotional e-mail announcements and the go!Miles frequent-flier program (both are free).

When: Go! flights to Lanai and Molokai are scheduled to start during July 2007.

Caveat: This is a tentative announcement, and is subject to change at any time.

Why Go: As long as go! offers inter-island flights to Lanai and Molokai for the same price as to other islands (regularly priced from $37.40/47.40 for go!Miles members/non-members, including taxes and fees).

Why Not: If go! does not beat the prices of flights offered by its competitors. Currently, the cheapest flights I could find from Honolulu to Lanai or Molokai cost $65 each way (including taxes and fees) with Pacific Wings via Orbitz.

Contact: go!, (888) 435-9462

– Sara Benson, L.A. Times Travel Deal Detective

[Photo credit: Associated Press]

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007 at 6:20 am by Sara Benson and is filed under Hawaii, Hawaii's Big Island, Islands & Beaches, Lanai, Maui, Molokai, Oahu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments on “Hawaii: New go! flights to Molokai & Lanai”

Andrew Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Editor’s [slightly personal] note: Go recently released the following on-time stats via their e-newsletter:

[I cannot find them posted in the News area of the go! website.]

“Thru [sic] July 15th [2007] - 93.4%
June 2007 - 85.4%
May 2007 - 91.8%
April 2007 - 97.7%…. [etcetera]”

I guess I picked a bad month (June) for my first go! experience.

We were delayed for several hours in Honolulu en route to Kauai by ‘mechanical difficulties’; outbound flight was ~~on-time~~ (delayed by nearly an hour, causing us to have to sprint to our Mainland connection in humid Honolulu). On that flight, the air-conditioning was out on what otherwise was a pretty comfy plane.

The biggest cause of frustration was the near complete lack of in-terminal communication about the flight delays. Go appeared to outsource most of their ground operations to other carriers (like United) and no update announcements were made; the left hand of the staff that was on duty didn’t seem to know what the right hand was doing

I ended up calling go!’s (Mesa’s, Arizona-based?) customer service number for updates (they told me my delayed flight had already departed … then directed me to speak to the non-existent in-terminal staff!), after their flight tracking tool on their website told my mobile device that the tool was experiencing technical difficulties.

So, the good intentions and hype are definitely out there. Now it seems like it’s time for go! to re-focus their energy on execution.

Any other first-hand accounts of recent go! flights?

- Andrew
Sr. Editor/Producer, travel.latimes.com
Andrew Says:
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Editor’s note: I contacted go!’s PR department (via the email address listed on their website) inviting them to reply to my message above immediately after posting it, but haven’t received a reply.

I just wanted to make it clear that we have given them an opportunity to tell their side of the story.

- Andrew
Sr. Editor/Producer, travel.latimes.com