Spendthrift Shoestring

Three Departure Boards

Belgrade. May 2008.

Frankfurt. September 2008. (Better Frankfurt departure board image here.)

London Stansted. May 2008.

JetBlue, JFK's Terminal 6, and the Weakening of a Brand

I flew JetBlue last night from JFK to Buffalo, and it got me thinking.

It seems to me that JetBlue has never really recovered from the complete collapse it experienced over the course of several days in February 2007. For those who have forgotten the airline's spectacular meltdown during that fateful week, the events went something like this: a big winter storm hit the East Coast, huge numbers of flights were canceled, back-up crews and planes could not be found to accommodate the masses left without flights, and JetBlue's dispersed customer service agents wilted under the enormous pressure. To make things worse, planes full of furious and exhausted passengers remained on the runway for up to 11 hours. The whole thing amounted to a damning public relations catastrophe.

As fate would have it, I was supposed to take off to Santiago, DR on the first day of the meltdown for a long weekend with my sister. Obviously, we never made it.

JetBlue's initial response was very bewildered and disorganized, but they came around relatively quickly. The airline offered all affected customers a credit for twice the amount spent on any flight canceled during the period in question. So far so good. (I still haven't exhausted my credit. I will finally do so in December, on a roundtrip flight to Santo Domingo.)

Despite this response, which was the right thing to do for public relations reasons as well as on grounds of corporate responsibility, the airline has floundered in the public's estimation. Why is this? Without any hard evidence here, it's my sense that fares have not remained low. Over the last few months, I've found very few truly cheap fares on JetBlue. I should acknowledge one notable exception, a JFK-St. Maarten roundtrip my friend Miranda purchased, which I believe was well under $350. Aside from that, every time I've approached JetBlue to begin to think about planning a trip I've found disagreeably dear fares and have turned to other carriers.

There's also the emergence of Virgin America to consider. VA unquestionably one-ups JetBlue in the on-board entertainment field. (Not only is there live television, but you can order food and send dirty messages to that cutie in the row in front of you, too! Wheeeee, flying is fun!) Virgin America is also expanding slowly and, based on my anecdotal experience as a passenger, quite flawlessly.

Signs of crisis in the JetBlue brand are on display at JFK's Terminal 6. Frankly, the terminal is a sty. Go into the bathrooms and you'll see dust and dirt gathered along the floor. The public address system squawks. The food vendors serve low-quality grub. The Wi-Fi is nice, but it doesn't always work. JFK is the airline's biggest hub, its flagship. And Terminal 6 is neither exciting nor welcoming.

I feel like a scold. But more than that, I feel annoyed that an airline with such great potential has seemed to drop the ball. I recall that once upon a time I loved JetBlue. I loved its brand, and I loved the fact that it could fly me places for a reasonable fare. The soon-to-debut Terminal 5 is key for the airline. A beautiful reinhabitation of the iconic terminal has great rebranding potential and may help the airline get back on track. But it's only part of the deal. JetBlue needs to recapture that sense of effortlessness and freshness, and of course those verifiably, comparably cheap fares that attract customers in the first place.

Before finishing this post I did a cursory Google search for JetBlue in the news and I came across a post by Matt Phillips in the Wall Street Journal's Middle Seat Terminal Blog today about a tripling in per-passenger complaints about the airline to the Department of Transportation during August 2008 in comparison to August 2007.

JetBlue has to get cracking.

Cheap Flights

Jamie Rhein had a good Gadling post on Tuesday devoted to competitive flight pricing. It suggested that for all the talk about higher airfares, there are plenty of good deals to be found. My Lufthansa return fare in September would certainly corroborate Rhein's general point. I flew JFK to Frankfurt for $578 roundtrip, including all taxes and charges.

My search benefited from flexibility. Though my dates were fixed to within a few days, I didn't need to fly into a particular airport, and looked at an arc of arrival points from Zurich through Amsterdam.

Incidentally, looking ahead to the winter, I'm already seeing some very good fares in and out of Nordic hubs. I won't buy a ticket yet, though. The pre-Christmas airfare sales to Scandinavia are often quite good.

Has Alitalia Just Been Saved?

Today things are looking up for Alitalia. If last-minute efforts to save Alitalia succeed under the current plan, the airline would be run by CAI, the Italian Air Company. Alitalia and Air One would merge, and Lufthansa and Air France-KLM would provide needed investment.

There's also the intriguing question of what might happen if these negotiations fail. On Tuesday, easyJet made public their interest in several domestic Italian routes in exchange for Alitalia's corresponding airport slots. It raises the question: if this last-ditch plan fails, what will happen to Alitalia's airport slots at airports around the world?

Horizon: Not Bad

This week I flew to Portland to see my father and other family members. I flew Alaska Airlines on the way up from SFO. Returning earlier today I flew Horizon (which has been owned by Alaska since 1986) into Oakland.

Two things made the flight pleasant. First, complementary beer and wine were served; second, the in-flight snacks were edible miniature bruschette. After years and years of crap snacks dusted with too much salt or sugar, the plain and delicious simplicity of Horizon's snack was a relief.

I was set to laud Horizon as my personal aviation surprise of the year, but then a creaky, frustrating annoyance materialized. We had to wait about 15 minutes for the airplane occupying our intended gate slot to move on. And then, once our Bombardier lumbered up to the gate, there was a jetway malfunction that swallowed up another five minutes. I wouldn't want to charge Horizon with sole responsibility for either event, but frankly these last-minute disembarkation delays suck. Every frequent American flier I know has experienced the frustration of blocked gates at arrival. We need better scheduling at airports and an increase in tarmac passenger releases.

Germanwings to Kyiv

I forecasted this one, however tentatively, back in December! Germanwings will fly from Berlin and Cologne/Bonn to Kyiv beginning in October. Thanks to Air Scoop for the buzz.

Notable: Vietnam Low-Cost Flight News

My friend TJ has been tearing it up with his amazing Vietnam blog, 9000 Hours in Saigon, which is full of advice, analysis, and astute observations.

TJ has begun to turn his attention to low-cost air travel in Vietnam. Check out his posts on Jetstar Pacific's initial announcement of three new domestic routes in Vietnam, his suspicions that Qantas Group woes might affect Jetstar's expansion plans, and a look at Jetstar's route axeings.

With these posts, TJ helps fill out the budget airline picture beyond Europe and North America. I look forward to his future probes into Asia's low-cost air transportation scene.

Treats from Argentina, Mostly

Preparing to be away from home for 15 weeks, it turns out, requires the completion of many tasks. Thus, the reduced posting pace of late.

Over the past week I've had the happy fortune to snack on an entire box of Havanna alfajores, brought back from Buenos Aires by my sister. I've had alfajores in the past, but honestly they just didn't thrill me. These Havanna confections, however, are a different story altogether. They were exquisitely delicious, and I loved their presentation, in a bright beautiful yellow box of individually-wrapped alfajores. I'll leave it to others to parse the magic of the alfajor. I'll just say that the approximations found in Manhattan pastry cases aren't even in the same ballpark as these babies.

Also from Argentina via Marisa: current issues of Pronto and Paparazzi. I admire the full narratives on the cover of Pronto, a magazine that does not believe in the gentle tease. Paparazzi trumpets "¡El Embarazo Del Año!" on their cover, claiming that the pregnancy of the year belongs to Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, the girlfriend of Gael Garcia Bernal. In actuality, it appears that the two haven't even acknowledged being in a relationship. Also, her pregnancy doesn't officially exist. Great cover, though. 

What else? I'm glad that I bought my June London-Isle of Man air ticket from Flybe rather than Euromanx, as the latter has gone belly-up.

April 2008 LCC Performance Digest

With the continuing stream of bad aviation industry news, you could be forgiven for imagining that Europe's low-cost carriers are all in crisis. In fact, this is not quite the case. To wit: April's performance stats for Ryanair, Air Berlin, and SkyEurope.

Ryanair's load factor fell 4 percent in April against last April 2007's numbers, from 83 percent to 79 percent, while their passenger numbers rose 15 percent, up to 4.72 million passengers. In offering an explanation for the former stat, Ryanair's press release notes that Easter occurred in March this year, thereby explaining last April's high load factor and, by extension, this April's 4 percent load factor decline. One understands why the airline failed to mention the positive effects of an Easter bump in their March 2008 statistical round-up.

Air Berlin had universally sunny numbers in April, with a 4.5 percent load factor increase (from 74.3 to 78.8 percent) and a 6.5 percent jump in passengers, to 2.24 million. Air Berlin's stats include passengers served on some other airlines, all part of the Air Berlin Group: Belair, LTU, and Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter.

On its surface, SkyEurope's April performance appears to be the worst of the three. The airline's load factor fell from 82.1 percent to 70.7 percent, while the the number of passengers flown declined 4.7 percent, to 280,000. Note that SkyEurope's press release title erroneously trumpets last April's passenger numbers. Odd. These numbers don't look good. I'm hoping that the changes made by the airline over the last many months will improve their future stats. 

Ukraine Gets Cheap Flights

Back at the end of December, I predicted that 2008 would see further low-cost carrier expansion in Eastern Europe, with more routes into Romania and Bulgaria and the tentative development of routes into Ukraine and Moldova. I thought that we might see SkyEurope and even Ryanair beginning some routes to Kyiv by the end of the year.

But the first serious move comes from Hungarian Wizz Air, who will be launching seven Ukrainian domestic routes in July. Wizz Air's Ukraine hub will be Kyiv; they'll fly between the capital and L'viv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Simferopol, and Zaporizhia, and will also fly routes between Simferopol and both L'viv and Kharkiv. Details are here. The airline is not running any international routes in or out of Ukraine.