magiciansampras

I'm actually already in Columbus because I had to come early, but my wife is supposed to fly BOS-JFK-CMH tonight. This could be tricky! The weather in BOS apparently is complete crap.

Any insiders know how bad the delays are going to get?

nsx

Exactly two hours and 49 minutes.

This exemplifies the risk of booking the last flight of the day, a risk exacerbated by JetBlue's routings that repeatedly send aircraft through crowded hubs. If you compare Southwest's results, you will see that their last flights of the day are also delayed, but rarely by more than an hour.

In my opinion, JetBlue's customers still face a significantly higher probability of multi-hour delay than on any other major airline. That's a loyalty killer, and it really needs to be addressed even if it increases costs 5% to 10%.

Vouchers for delays can't rebuild loyalty if the underlying problem of delays is not fixed. Spare aircraft and crews at the hubs would be the conventional approach. In the longer term it's less costly to limit traffic through delay-prone airports, a la Southwest.

Another option is for JetBlue to hand out free novels when flights are delayed more than 2 hours. @:-)

magiciansampras

Thanks for the insight! In this case the wife had to work pretty much a full day so the last flights out were the only option. Actually, B6's pickings to CMH are pretty sparse, so she would have had to leave really early in the day (i.e. take a half day) to make an earlier one.

I didn't want to say anything because I don't have data, but it does seem that B6 fares pretty poorly on the last flights of the night, IME. It's interesting that you have the same observation.

But hey, we got to use the vouchers and my wife said the flight service was pretty good. She did think that they could have done more on the ground at JFK to give updates. Apparently the information was sparse and I was giving her delay information well before the gate agents were.

Seat13c

Slowest of information being broadcasted by gate agents does happen with every airline. I've personally seen it from CO, AA, and NWA. A lot of times, I would either call the airline's phone number or a friend that's near a computer to find out information rather than aproaching the GA's just for mere information. Usually it is a product of them being bogged down a lot of things happening at once and they usually make the announce b/c they have multiple people asking them the same thing at the same time. On a lesser frequent note, they make not know information right away themselves.

nsx

Rosy scenario departure estimates are the number 1 complaint on the Southwest forum.