JetBlue’s Top Priority is to Become No. 1 Somewhere

There aren't many places where JetBlue has a clear leadership position, but the airline is betting it can find enough opportunities to propel it to profitability.

Dear readers,

I'm sensing a shift in how my industry insider sources speak about JetBlue. For a long time, they would wonder: what's wrong with JetBlue? Or, why is the airline being so irrational? But no one asks me that anymore.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. My sources are not betting that JetBlue will emerge as a force in the U.S. airline industry (they're generally skeptical). But people seem to respect CEO Joanna Geraghty, president Marty St. George, and network chief Daniel Shurz, and understand they’re doing the best they can with their limited strengths — namely by flying people in the Northeast to vacations and to visit friends and relatives.

I spoke last week to Shurz, a long-time favorite of mine for his dry sense of humor, who joined JetBlue in April 2024 as senior vice president of revenue, network, and enterprise planning. He arrived just after JetBlue made the most obvious cuts, like closing the Los Angeles focus city, with a mandate to position aircraft in markets where they could make money. It’s more complicated than this, but Shurz joked that if the route went to an airport in the Central Time Zone, it's probably gone, replaced by a new premium leisure route from the Northeast, mostly to Florida or the Caribbean.

"My biggest role is to make sure JetBlue is profitable," Shurz told me. "There isn't a successful JetBlue if we can't get back to profitability, so we have to get back to profitability."

It’s not unusual for a wounded airline to retreat to its strengths. The problem is that JetBlue doesn’t have many of those. That is the curse of being the nation's No. 6 market-share airline in an industry in which scale is everything. But there’s probably some market niche for JetBlue, and Shurz told me he’s trying to find it, route by route.

"We are a New York and New England point-of-sale focused airline," he said. "A lot of the network changes are fundamentally around offering destinations that have the demand to fill 140-seat and larger aircraft from the Northeast focus cities and the Northeast secondary markets we serve."¹

Shurz and I had a wide-ranging discussion about his view of JetBlue's network, and how the airline handles competition with carriers (large and small) that prefer it remain wounded. Here are some highlights from our chat.