Say it ain't so!

JetBlue is one of my favorite airlines. JetBlue recently announced their new policy of charging $7 per pillow. Say it ain't so! Even with all the recent announcements of domestic airlines nickel and dime-ing air travelers, I didn't think that JetBlue would pull the same kinds of stunts. Liz and I are big fans of JetBlue. For several years, we were frequent fliers on the JFK to BUR / BUR to JFK routes. We usually took the 6:45am-ish (or something like that, which I think they may have canceled) flight out of JFK which means we would have to wake up around 4:30am in our little UWS apartment. This flight always sounds like a good idea when you're planning it months or weeks in advance. Usually, I'm cursing myself (a common activity) the night before, when it's midnight and I had not packed yet. Anyway, JetBlue ain't Singapore Airlines or BA's flat bed business class, but it's solid - decent fares, easy-to-book online, good entertainment (live broadcast TV through DirecTV is great except for the delay when changing channels), and decent seats for economy. They are a lot more on-time than United, American or the established US airlines. And there is still a sense of some order unlike Southwest, which has a lot of good elements but is basically a flying Greyhound to me. Anyway, all this to say that I'm a fan of JetBlue and a bit disappointed with this new decision. What are they going do next? Put a coin slot next to the screen, as a colleague remarked today.

To be fair, I'm sure they crunched the numbers and figured out that they needed an $X uplift in revenues per flight to make up for the ballooning cost structure. Let's say around 1/3 of folks usually take a pillow on a regular flight (not the red-eye). On an A320 with 150 seats, that's 50 pillows. I'd say the $7 hurdle immediately halves this pool of people. Now we're down to 25 folks paying $7 for the pillow. That's $175 extra per flight. Doesn't seem like much. Even if we double that to $350, I just don't see that really moving the needle. So I'm a bit confused why they did this.

Anyway, overall I would still be happy to fly JetBlue again soon. But if they start charging for the pretzels...