intrepid720

It was a pretty awesome experience this weekend, actually. I flew the redeye DEN-BOS on Thursday night and then the evening BOS-DEN tonight. It's pretty amazing that the plane can pull up to the gate with a load of arriving pax, disembark, clean, board and be on their way in 40 minutes or less. This happened in both directions for me this weekend. It really is incredibly efficient, when all goes right. My redeye was comfortable -- all of the flight crew in both the cockpit and the cabin seem sensitive to the fact that it's a redeye and try to make it as quiet and comfortable as possible. All employees that I encountered were enthusiastic, attentive, and courteous. Previous to this trip, my JetBlue experiences have been negative.

Unfortunately, I've had way too many bad experiences with this airline to continue flying with them. I have personally flown B6 on DEN-BOS-DEN three times in the past two years and two out of those three had significant delays. One was the cancellation of a midday flight after which I got reaccommodated on the redeye (a ~12 hour delay), a change which seriously hampered my plans the following day and for the weekend. One was a delay of the redeye itself by 5 hours which made an already terrible sleep schedule worse. Two out of three is a bad percentage. In addition to these, my fiance had an entire trip cancelled, unable to be reaccomodated for the weekend that the trip was planned around, and in another case, a friend was stranded in SFO and forced to buy a full fare ticket on Northwest to return. DEN-BOS-DEN is ~3600 miles, so between my and my fiance's experience, we have 2 major delays and 1 complete cancellation in 14400 miles. If I widened the circle to include my friend, it would look worse from my point of view.

In the past two years, I have flown over 170000 miles on other airlines (predominately UA, but also US, AA, NW, DL, CO, and AirTran), and I have only once been told to "come back tomorrow (or the next day) or take a refund," as my fiance and friend were, even in the face of many weather and/or mechanical issues. and there have been only a handful of times (I estimate 4 or 5, but I don't have an exact count of those instances) that I was subject to delays more than 2 hours. Compared to JetBlue, that's an order of magnitude more flying, with a marginal increase in bad experience. These experiences are documented at all levels of status (as I just "climbed the ladder" over these last two years from general member on up), and if I were to fold in the experiences of my "general member" (and totally "leisure travel," totally "clueless in the ways of airlines") parents and other family, the bad-experience-to-miles-flown ratio of my immediate circle shrinks even more on the aforementioned airlines (with the addition of Frontier and Southwest).

So to me the proof is in the pudding - I won't be flying JetBlue again until I am confident that they can get me to where I'm going within a reasonable amount of time for me to make and keep my plans, and that I don't have to spend the week leading up to my trip fearing that it will be impacted or, worse, ruined before it even begins, as I did last week.

I hope JetBlue fixes their reliability issues. Their efficiency in fair weather is remarkable.

magiciansampras

I am in the same club as you, intrepid. JetBlue has just let me down too many times with IROPS, both weather related and mechanicals. Hopefully one day they'll approach the reliability of the legacy carriers and their competition.

dietcoke

Magic. I know you love United, but do you know that they have had 9 engine failures in the last 3 months alone. Its got to the point that their pilots are refusing certain aircraft.

magiciansampras

Actually, to be honest, I don't love any airline. I view them as a mechanism for getting me from point A to point B. The fact that I fly United is mostly a function of 1) the miles I have accrued and 2) the fact that they are convenient for where I need to fly to. When they aren't, I don't fly them.

I'm not sure I understand your point about the engine failures, however. Are you implying that United is less safe than other airlines? IME all airlines experience mechanical problems with their aircraft.

dietcoke

I understand your frustration with jetBlue especially when it comes to Irops. Infact I agree with nearly everything you say, however our maintenance is easily on power with any of the legacy carriers. I think if there was more accountability at JetBlue our Irops would run much smoother. I agree that whenever the conditions are right we run a kickass operation but when things go downhill they go downhill quickly.

magiciansampras

Absolutely. And just so I'm clear, I don't fault JetBlue for having mechanical delays and irregular ops situations. That happens at every airline. I was delayed recently on United because they had some lights go on in the cockpit and maintenance had to investigate. The difference, IME, is that when this happens on UA they get you out some other way. Be it through a different city, or in this particular case, they had another plane. The same type of flexibility just doesn't exist with JetBlue and that makes it scary when you're flying them and have to get somewhere.

Or don't even have to.. want to, really. My family wants to go to Cancun in December from Boston. The obvious choice is JetBlue with the direct flight. I am extremely hesitant to book this, however, because if something goes wrong with that flight, it could be days before we get there.

dietcoke

I recommend that you book the flight. From Oct 1st JetBlue are shifting more flying out off JFK to both Boston and Orlando so I honestly think this will have a positive effect on reliablity as it will relieve some off the operational pressure from New York. Whilst we still have many many operational issues IMO I truely believe that the majority of the problems are ATC induced. The shift in flying should help.

jetBlueNYFL

The OP confuses me. The first two experiences were negative, gave JetBlue a third chance and had nonthing but praise for the airline. But we don't hear about the recent positive experience past the first paragraph - from there it's a rant about the past experiences and how they won't give JetBlue a chance until further IROP improvement. We know that IROPs are not handled all that well at JetBlue right now, but why eliminate them altogether when the OP just had such a great experience?! Also, no where do I see why the first two trips were affected with delays/cancellations (most likely weather/ATC).

sbm12

My guess is that the 3rd ticket was already purchased and that the Fiance's experiences were the tipping point, but the OP will have to say for certain. As for the reason for the delay affecting the customer experience, sadly it does not in most circumstances. If the "experience" is that the flights are delayed a lot it doesn't matter so much to me that the reason for the delay is ATC, weather or mechanical if the carrier appears to have a disproportionately high number of incidents. I'm more willing to forgive ATC/WX but it gets harder to continue doing so over time.

intrepid720

This is precisely what I meant. The thrid ticket was already purchased. While I appreciate the excellent in-flight experience when everything's hunky dory, I place higher value on "chance of getting where I'm going," even if i have to put up with a somewhat degraded experience or service, relatively speaking. That's just how I place value. And that's my bottom line.

I did not mention the cause of the delays/cancellations, because, as sbm12 points out, it doesn't much matter to me -- all I see are the extreme delays cancellations. I am comparing apples-to-apples here -- I summed all my "bad experience" on other airlines without regard to wx or mx, just as I summed my B6 "bad experience." I still see an order of magnitude more flying with no appreciable increase in such incidents.

Of course weather/ATC happens and is out of airline control. But I will say that there have been many many many weather related IRROPs in my 170k miles on other airlines, and the large majority of them have been solved without significant delay due to some combination of interlining and/or hub rerouting. These features have been mentioned before on this forum as the primary barriers to better performance by B6.