Defining the JetBlue Experience

We spent 4.5 years defining the customer experience, and we tried to put our money into things that mattered to people. Food is one example: I have never heard a single soul say that they haven’t had a good meal, and so they’ll book an airline ticket. This year, we’ll serve 10 million customers. If we’d spent $5 on a meal for each customer, we’d have spent $50 million of food that wasn’t appreciated. So we use humor to inform people that there won’t be full meals, and we provide snacks at 17 cents apiece. We knew that televisions would be memorable. I remember one of the happiest days when we were starting JetBlue was when we found the companie who installs direct TVs in planes. I wanted to give people control on an airplane. The cost of implementing the televisions was a fraction of the cost of serving full meals. Cleaning the airline was another example. And helping customers put bags away, to improve the gateway time.