Making Travel Slightly Less Miserable: Thanks, JetBlue

My running commentary to the contrary on Twitter aside, I’m not averse to looking for silver linings. More often that you’d expect, they’re there. As Napoleon once observed, things are never as bad as they seem (forget, for now, the second half of that particular quote).

Yesterday was a perfect illustration of this. You can focus on the negative – two three plus hour delays, flooded airports, and walking through the door after four in the morning – or you can try and extract the positive. You made it home, you didn’t have to sleep at yet another airport, and you don’t have the Avian flu. Ok, the last one’s sort of questionable, but how about the people of JetBlue?

The low cost carrier got hammered on the PR and financial fronts – and deservedly so – after the pre-Christmas debacle that left hundreds of travelers stranded on planes for 9 hours or more. Not being on one of those fateful flights, it’s easy for me to look beyond that, and see that they’ve learned some important lessons. Things that JetBlue did right yesterday:

1. Rebooking:
   Alarmed at the weather reports I was seeing, I rebooked myself on an earlier flight up to JFK to give myself a better chance of making my connection (a good decision, as it turned out: my original flight, scheduled to arrive at JFK at 9:10 PM actually got there just before 1:30 AM). That’s not particularly impressive – most of us have rebooked ourselves at one time or another. What was was the fact that I was able to accomplish this myself, via the web, without talking to anyone.
2. Individual Initiative:
   Arriving at the airport, I was greeted by the very friendly and personable Judith M (really wish I’d gotten her last name), who was only too happy to see if she could get me exit row seats (she did) and talk to me in detail about the weather and forecasts and odds. Rare, but not that rare. But it was her initiative that set her apart; on her own, with no request from me, she offered to get me onto an even earlier flight – at no cost – via standby. That was nice, what was even better was that she took a look at the flight, saw that it had 50 seats, and went ahead and gave me a seat assignment. Hugely convenient, and entirely unexpected in a world of often surly gate and harried gate attendants. I hope someone from JetBlue reads this and gives Judith a bonus – or even better, a promotion.
3. Handling the Delay:
   Nothing was going right yesterday afternoon. There were storms up and down Florida, which was bad, but storms up and down the eastern seaboard including New York, which was worse (our eventual flight path was way out into the Bermuda Triangle, just as the History Channel was showing one of those wacky triangle “documentaries”). We boarded 15 minutes late, sat on the plane for a half hour, and then got the bad news.

   Rather than hope for good weather, as the old JetBlue might have done, they did the right thing and got us off the plane. As they did with a flight to Newark, and a flight to White Plains. Packing several hundred seriously delayed travelers into a relatively enclosed area (we couldn’t range far from the gate against the possibility that we would be unexpectedly released), however good your intentions, can be a recipe for disaster. What was JetBlue’s strategy? Ply them with food and drink. They had folks cart up a dozen or more crates of water, soda, and the usual assortment of food they carry on board. Quieted things down quite nicely.

4. Personnel Availability:
   Following the initial delay, and the subsequent longer one, not only did the entire JetBlue gate staff make themselves available to answer any and all questions, the pilot took the time to circulate with customers both on the plane and off, fielding all sorts of inquiries openly. As a believer that bad news is worse than no news, this type of up front transparency helped keep folks from getting overheated and anxious about what they didn’t know. It doesn’t alleviate the crowding, or the fact that you’re not home on time, but it’s a nice gesture.
5. Scheduling:
   Although I was never trapped on a plane during the Christmas disaster, I was relatively put out by JetBlue’s inexplicable tendency to refuse to cancel or delay flights until the last minute – hours after Frontier and United had cancelled every flight into Denver JetBlue insisted that they were still on time. Yesterday? Not so much. Flights were delayed early and often, which is all you can ask for for planning purposes.

When foul weather strikes, the conventional wisdom is that there’s not much airlines can do about it. And as it pertains to actually taking off and arriving at the destination, that’s true. But it also doesn’t acknowledge the fact that there is in fact a great deal airlines can do to make their passengers more comfortable – and thereby, manageable – in the interim. My thanks, then, to JetBlue for handling yesterday’s unpleasantness with both grace and humor.

I’m still a bit groggy from last night, as I was prevented from catching up on sleep this morning by several explosions out my window (they’re blasting for a foundation), but I’m mostly through the past two days’ email. Next up is trying to finish off the Rational conference post, and catching up on some regrettably necessary paperwork. As a reminder, will be in the office tomorrow, and then off to Boston Friday.