B6 Executive bashed CO on a.net
 

Interesting thread over on airliners.net:

B6's Executive VP, Chief Revenue Officer, Trey Urbahn touted his airline's performance this morning with a title:

"Jetblue 54: Continental 3"

Didn't take long for others to find out who he was.

Anyways, the fact is that B6 performed much better than CO this morning in NYC, but unfortunately, he also easily skipped over the fact his airline cancelled many red-eyes to JFK on Thursday night, and canceled most flights Friday morning when CO was operating more or less okay until around 11am.

You can read it here:

http://www.airliners.net/discussions....main/3311643/

Seriously, they're the best cherry-pickin' stat spinners in the industry.

Quite amusing how they're trying to deflect criticism away from themselves and instead show in a futile attempt how poorly others may be performing. But if B6 hadn't screwed up to begin with in February they wouldn't be in the spotlight for every mass cancellation they're having.

This is even more amusing:

"The facts speak for themselves, my friend.

Since you've "outed me" in this thread, let me make a few biased observations:

JetBlue is different. Perhaps that's why we are held to a higher standard. Our crewmembers have built a great airline and are proud it, as by the way, am I. Last month, we let our customers down. In addition to apologizing and compensating those who we inconvenienced, we made a commitment not to let it happen again. We articulated this commitment externally in our customer Bill of Rights. Internally, we identified areas where we made mistakes and have taken substantive steps to correct them. I may be biased, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due: Thanks to the dedication and hard work of our crewmembers, we managed to meet and overcome a significant weather event yesterday. In doing so, we've proved to our customers and to ourselves that we're different because we're better.

sincerely,

Trey Urbahn
JetBlue Airways"
http://www.airliners.net/discussions...n/3311643/1/#7

Yeah, they do one thing right for once and proclaim they're better :rolleyes:

Wow, if that's actually him that's amazing. Good to see they are hard at working posting on internet message boards to defend themselves over there :rolleyes:

I would bet that it's someone impersonating him.

Possible, but:

1) would an impersonator be so subtle to use the screen name "OneJetSky", instead of something that at least hints at B6?

2) this person registered October 2005, so he didn't just register to post this thread;

3) why would someone choose an Executive VP, Chief Revenue Officer, to impersonate? Wouldn't one find something more prominent, or publicly known to put as his "real name"?

Edit: OneSkyJets is a private charter company which Mr Urbahn is the chairman of the board.

Risky Business
 

It's very risk for an EVP of a publically traded company to be posting his opinions in an online message board.

But if that's how they run their airline, I wouldn't put any credibility into any comparisons they make vs. CO.

Agreed! I too don't believe it's the real deal.

If indeed this really was the VP of whatever at Jetblue that made this post...It does not speak well of this industry's management mentality. I don't mean to say that all airline management have this childish sort of mentality to make such a ridiculous "see how bad we weren't this time". But if it is any indication...no wonder the industry has the problems that it does.:confused:

Great point. Putting out these kind of comments without a solid filter from legal is stupid in my opinion. Like they really need an SEC investigation!

Don't they still have people stuck at JFK from the last snowstorm?

After reading through that thread I believe that he actually is who he says he is. If I'm right, he's an absolute embarrassment to his airline.

It is no longer unusual for more innovative companies' management to blog. At least 5% of the Fortune 500 have a corporate blog.

This includes executives a number of notable public companies:
- Jonathan Schwartz; President of SUN Microsystems;
- Bob Lutz; Vice-Chairman of General Motors;
- Robert Scoeble; Technical Evangelist for Microsoft;
- Randy Baseler; VP of Marketing for Boeing;
- Marc Cuba; owner HDNet and Dallas Mavericks;
- John Dragoon; CMO of Novell;
- Diane Greene; President of VMWare (now part of EMC)
- Sab Kunaijia; VP NBC Digital Media;
- J. Willard Marriott Jr.; CEO of Marriott;
- Ted Leonsis; Vice-Chairmal, America Online;
- Michael Tiemann; CTO, RedHat;
- Hu Yoshida; VP and CTO; Hitachi Data Systems;
A list of over 200 executives who blog can be found at:
http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki....s.CEOBlogsList


Sure, there's a risk (much less from the SEC and much more from the types of bottom-feeders who give all attorneys a bad name). But blogs that appear open and honest (including "we made a mistake") fly well with customers. Those that are obviously written by PR hacks don't. But it's probably good practice to have your PR department review your work ... this would prevent backfiring through this sort of arrogance, as allegedly spouted by Mr. Urbahn.

Now, I understand the temptation to crow about improved behavior, especially after the significant egg on B6's face. But bashing the competition in this case is dangerous and quite likely to backfire. Whoever wrote this just does not get it ... these sorts of statistics are relevant in the long term. Having a lucky weekend where your competition got hit worse than you did (and where you fudged the numbers by canceling flights) doesn't mean you've fixed your problems. Nobody buys the "quick fix" ... One lucky weekend doesn't make you "better."

The following is not bad ... but all of the positive karma is reversed by the claim in the last paragraph. Anyone with a single P.R. course from a community college ... or who has read "P.R. for dummies" would know better. Certainly, this "Trey Urbahn" should; hence I have some suspicion that this is the work of an impostor.