Doesn't mean people fell comfortable spending money though.
​​We are also seeing less snow birds from Canada, which are a pretty big part of the Florida economy. Less travelers from Europe.
with less travel to/from Europe, airlines tend to flood the domestic markets. Adding too many seats, making it harder for us to charge a profitable ticket price.
Add in that alot of our money is made in VFR leasure markets, where people might be less inclined to want to deal with the hassles of dealing with immigration control.

 

Depends who you ask. Remember, we went from "We're gonna have an incredible economy" to "We need a recession, it's short term pain for long term gain, tighten those belts" from the same crowd in a matter of weeks.

Maybe not having an actual economic plan and alienating your allies isn't the winning strategy some think it is.

 

JetBlue wasn’t making money back in 2023 when everything was booming but now it’s an economy problem?!

 

I think they need good economy + well run operation.

2023 was good economy, bad operation......Things certainly seem like they're running better now, and I'll give JG credit for that.

 

Well the economy is pretty important for a business, isn't it?

You're also missing my point. No, we haven't been making money for years, but especially this year many people are praising who is in office and that the economy is going to skyrocket and we're all gonna do great, and then within a matter of weeks the narrative became "We need a recession".

We rely on VFR travel, and when you have a worried population who doesn't want to spend money and/or travel to the US for reasons, it directly harms our business. My point is that the current economic climate is not going to help an airline that is trying to recover. JB hasn't done well during the best of times, the assumption was that the economy would grow and that an administration that is more business friendly and historically easier on regulations would make it easier for us to run an airline, instead we're now relying on "hope" to get the company turned around. We haven't had good news in years, and now that we're a year or so into JetForward, we're piling on more bad news.

 

From what I can tell, a lot of people on this forum have been saying this about the industry in general only to be shouted down and silenced or out right banned from this forum, pretty sad.

 

A couple of points.

- The current administration isn’t doing anything they haven’t promised. Things like tariffs and immigration shift things like the markets and national identity. It’s just that no one reads beyond a headline (this is for both sides of the isle). Tariffs reshape the global economy especially when it affects other nations. I digress on this point.

- JB hasn’t made money in years. This is not a unique problem to JB though. Outside of the legacies and maybe Sunny, no one made money (regionals don’t count here). The point is that the economy affects every industry, just some harder than others, but travel demand was strong. Y’all should’ve made money, but didn’t due to things like the failed merger, engine issues, and an inefficient operation (I guess it’s fixed now?). In the current climate, the economy is still strong, but people are a bit more cautious. Meaning, the legacies are in good shape, but carriers that service hot vacation destinations are suffering.

- You mentioned Europe and Canada. Canada is down a couple of percentages, but the rest of the international markets is holding steady. This is why y’all’s Europe flights are still lucrative. Additionally, a majority of US carrier’s international revenue originate from the US to abroad. Meaning, Americans are still traveling outside of the country for one reason or another.

- Lastly, the bolded sentence above highlights an important distinction. Airlines “trying to recover” usually don’t turn a profit in any economy as it takes capital to correct what needs correcting and to survive. So it doesn’t matter what the economy does as the books were always gonna be in the red. Just a matter of how much in the red. The bigger question would is “how much capital is needed to survive a down turn and fix the company?” This is important because both need to happen so that a profit can be made when the economy comes back up. Is disingenuous to blame the current economy on the lack of profitability at JB.

 

GDP output in 2019 was $21.5T.
Jetblue revenue was $8B in 2019 and it was profitable.

GDP output in 2024 was $29.2T.
Jetblue revenue was $9.3B in 2024.

Jetblue has 14% more nominal revenue in 2024 compared to 2019, but adjusted for inflation its 6.7% less real revenue. Jetblue also has 27 more planes than it had in 2019.

US airlines that were profitable in 2019 (pretty much all of them) don't lack profit because of not enough economic opportunity today.

 

JB isn’t going Bankrupt because of the economy. It’s because they don’t know how to run a fuqing airline. This didn’t happen overnight. So many missteps in the past 5-10 years.

 

Isn’t it said that if DAL didn’t have their co branded CC’s they would also lose money? We don’t have the scale to have passengers want to sign up or consider a TrueBlue card.