My colleague Chris Serres, one of the authors of the “Lenders Gone Wild” series that has stirred up state lawmakers, alerted me this week to the demise of JetAmerica, a startup airline he reported on, with a dose of skepticism, in May. Back then, it intended to offer flights between Minneapolis and Toledo starting Aug. 14, even though it hadn’t even cleared that plan with the Metropolitan Airports Commission. So Chris wasn’t shocked when the company made this announcement, less than two months later:

Clearwater, Florida - July 17 - JetAmerica, the Florida-based public charter operator, announced today that it was suspending sales to all markets and that it would immediately begin to notify affected customers and process refunds to all customers who have booked on the public charter flights.

“We are reluctantly suspending our public charter operations effective today,” said John Weikle, CEO, who has been with the company since April. “Finalizing the slots required to support our charter program at Newark has taken longer than expected and we have decided to suspend our operations in order to refocus on different markets. We still strongly believe that there is an unmet need for affordable air service to secondary markets and we look forward to offering this option again in the near future,” concluded Weikle.

All customers will receive automatic refunds within 7-14 business days. Any customer not receiving a full refund in 14 days should call 727-451-3970.

That time has about elapsed. If you were Toledo-bound and booked a flight on JetAmerica, we want to know whether you got your money back. Send Whistleblower an email or post a comment here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 9:54 am and is filed under Advertising claims, Businesses in hot water, Buyer beware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.