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October 12, 2003

First Impression of JetBlue

After hearing so much about JetBlue I finally had a chance to take a trip on one of their planes from JFK to Las Vegas.

To my surprise, terminal 6 at JFK has become the JetBlue Terminal and the chaos was organized as people who needed to check luggage were separated from those with nothing to check while waiting in-line at the passenger check-in counter. Except for the thermal paper receipt which also doubled as my boarding card nothing was unusual.

Getting to the gate I see the message - "Last Stop 4 Food" which meant to me that if I thought I was going to be hungry on the flight, now was the time to find something, anything to eat.

Boarding was quite a pleasant experience and while we ended up having to change planes at the gate because the DirecTV service was not functioning on the first plane, I found the airplane crew to be outgoing, focused, engaged and totally interested in servicing the needs of the passengers.

The one class of service made the long trip feel like an extended shuttle trip (referring to the NY/Boston and NY/WDC shuttles) on one hand but then having the DirecTV in the seats did significantly increase the cool factor. Turns out that most of the 24 channels they provide are not channels I would normally watch when staying locked in a room with nothing to do other than stretch my legs and walk around in small circles.

The only network channel they currently show is NBC.

But...I do think that JetBlue is a great showcase for how the airline industry can be disrupted by new technologies and that the advent of DirecTV in the seats should be the first of many new innovations which JetBlue customers will grow to expect. I was a little disappointed to learn that their WiFi service wasn't enabled yet but that will happen soon enough.

JetBlue has been on my personal radar screen ever since they announced that their call center agents are 100% distributed and that they rely on VoIP technologies to enable their call center agents to work from home.

As JetBlue continues to add routes, as long as they can continue to scale their customer centric approach to doing business, I have high expectations that JetBlue will help lead the way and drive the future of the airline industry.

p.s. Next time let me pay for optional services at my seat and turn on additional channels and/or enable video on demand.

Posted by jeff on October 12, 2003 04:54 AM | Permalink

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Comments

I loved flying on jetblue. They are efficient , inexpensive and courteous. Wish they would fly to raleigh durham airport.

Posted by: anne de lisi at November 23, 2003 05:57 AM

Hi Carl,

I'd like to think that JetBlue represents a real change agent for the airline industry. In some ways they are to the airlines what some of our friends have been to the communications industry. And while they are able to compete on price, they are also competing with better customer service and the addition of value added services. :-)

Best regards,

Jeff

Posted by: Jeff Pulver at October 12, 2003 11:19 AM

Jeff, because you did not check luggage you did not know that the thermal paper also would include your baggage claim.

In general they run two systems one for billing and one for plane operations.

It is actually very efficient being free from the legacy of old systems.

Kind Regards,

Carl

Posted by: Carl Ford at October 12, 2003 06:09 AM