Centerlines - January 2008 - (Page 17)

ONE ON ONE What advice would you give to an airport that’s trying to lure your service? In an ideal JetBlue situation, there’d be a curbside ticket counter and security checkpoint. The flow being seamless from the standpoint of customers. I think we look at an airport and say, “Listen, can we grow this into eight to nine movements per gate per day?” For the most part, we tend to be looking at stations where we’re going to be operating larger. I would like for an airport to really be in tune with concessions—food, beverages, specialty retail. Outside of snacks onboard the airplane, we don’t have meals on the airplane, so we encourage customers to buy at the airport and take it on. We do stimulate traffic at our airports, and we want to make sure that the infrastructure is in place to handle it. It’s no different than the Southwest effect over all these years. And, we tend to fly at the back of the clock too, so it’s not acceptable to have the car-rental place closed at midnight or even concessions closed at 10 p.m. because we have a lot of red-eye flights. I like to think of JetBlue, UPS and FedEx in the skies at night. By the end of 2008, what will be some of the key differences that we’ll see with you at the helm instead of David Neeleman? I think most importantly is we’ll see a more controlled growth. We’ve slowed down the growth of JetBlue really to strengthen our balance sheet, our credit metrics, and to really be maturing these markets, and fewer markets, in a timely manner. So it’ll be more controlled growth, slow growth, if you will. How many new markets did you open in 2007, and how many new routes did you open? Well, in 2006, we opened 16 new routes, and I think that in hindsight we certainly know that we were growing too fast and we opened too many routes. It’s just not realistic to mature 16 routes simultaneously. In 2007, the number is five new destinations. Why are you pulling out of Columbus and Nashville? The maturation of those routes is taking longer than we expected. Both of them are maturing, but we kind of look at a route and how it’s maturing over the course of anywhere from 24 to 36 months, and because the maturation was slower, we decided to reallocate the airplanes into where we thought the return on investment would be greater. What else is in store for 2008? We’re still working our 2008 budget, our annual operating plan, but something that looks like four to six new routes, and I would think that they’re probably more international destinations as opposed to domestic routes. What are some of the variables that you look at when selecting a new market? When we look at new city pairs, we’re certainly looking at the historic passenger-per-seat-eachway traffic, so we’re looking at the DOT historicals. Who’s flying at the city pair—whether they’re connecting or flying non-stop. We certainly look at communities of interest. Good examples: hooking up Orlando to Puerto Rico—not just to San Juan but to Aguadilla as well as Ponce, so three destinations. The second-largest Puerto Rican population in the mainland United States is across central Florida, so these are communities of interest we take a look at. www.aci-na.org | CENTERLINES NEW JETBLUE DESTINATIONS, 2006-08 2006: 14 new destinations Austin, TX Cancun, Mexico Charlotte, NC Hamilton, Bermuda Houston, TX Jacksonville, FL Newburgh-Hudson Valley, NY Oranjestad, Aruba Pittsburgh, PA Portland, ME Raleigh, NC Richmond, VA Sarasota, FL Tucson, AZ 2007: 5 new destinations Chicago, IL Nantucket, MA San Francisco, CA Santo Domingo, DR White Plains, NY 2008 destinations currently announced Puerto Plata, DR (Jan. 10) St. Maarten, Netherland Antilles (Jan. 17) 17 http://www.aci-na.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Centerlines - January 2008

Contents President’s Message Canadian Airports Associates’ Corner Policy Center Regulatory Front On the Hill and On the Stump One on One: Dave Barger Revenue: The Concessions Awards Environment: O’Hare Expansion Passenger Focus: Houston Friendly Safety and Security: After Comair, What Next? Air Service Recruiting: Charleston’s Acquisition of AirTran On Management: Performance Benchmarking at DFW Now Underway Grand Opening Conference Previews and Reviews New Members Index of Advertisers/Advertiser.com Box Scores

Centerlines - January 2008

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