It's Too Bad About JetBlue

I get really loyal to great companies, so much so that I'll often overlook poor treatment. I was really loyal to JetBlue, until last week.

I fell in love with the idea of JetBlue when it first showed up. Treat customers right; use technology to make service work better; stay focused on the fundamentals of flying -- more legroom, television at every seat, low cost operations, reasonable fares. At the time, my main alternative was United Airlines, bloated, arrogant, disorganized and sloppy.

Now every airline has been through hell, and those that made it have had to make themselves a lot more like JetBlue (and Southwest, the real model for low-cost airlines). And something has happened to JetBlue that means it has lost its difference and is now just another cheap airline. Perhaps it was the operations mess at JFK a few years ago, when people were stuck on JetBlue airplanes on the ground for hours waiting for gates to open up. Perhaps it is because the founder (David Neeleman) left the company and turned the leadership over to people with "better" operating experience. Perhaps it's just too hard to differentiate an airline when gas costs so much.

Last week put me over the top on JetBlue. At RDU, the lady who checked us in told us that the inbound flight was late and we might miss our connection at JFK. When we reached the gate, the same lady (an excellent representative for JetBlue, by the way) came to the conclusion that we would almost certainly miss our connection and started working on finding an alternative. We ended up switching (on our own) to a United connection through Denver (that actually got us back to SFO sooner than we were scheduled to).

The problem: JetBlue insisted that we had to check ourselves out of the flight we abandoned before they would cancel the second half of the reservation. We couldn't do that because we had already left the terminal to get to the United gate (with about 10 minutes to spare). And once they agreed to cancel the reservation, they charged so many change fees that they refunded less than half the return portion of the fare and only as a credit on future travel on JetBlue. It was clear that the attitude of the JetBlue representative was one of reluctance: reluctant to help, reluctant to provide service. But the reason we switched was because of JetBlue's airplane being late and making us miss our connection.

That attitude isn't what made me loyal to JetBlue in the first place. That attitude is pretty much what I get from United, American or any other legacy airline. (United performed exactly what they promised and treated us better than any other traveler, simply because we've flown a lot on their airline.) It feels like the accountants have taken over at JetBlue. (My apologies to the accountants reading this.) And it's hard to see one of my favorite companies lose its way and fritter away the brand loyalty it worked so hard to create in the first place.