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.
