JetBlue is extending its operations from Bradley International Airport, including providing nonstop services to four additional cities in California and Mexico. In a statement issued Tuesday, representatives with the Connecticut Airport Authority, which governs Bradley and the state’s five general aviation airports, confirmed JetBlue would soon be offering direct flights to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cancun. Cancun operation will launch on 19 Nov 2020, the Agency said, while nonstop flights to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are scheduled to begin on 18 Dec 2020.
JetBlue’s latest services are an excellent lively spot for Bradley amidst the coronavirus pandemic, which triggered an extraordinary drop amid worldwide air traffic capacity in late winter and early spring and possibly cost the facilities millions of dollars sales.
Although air transport has improved considerably since then, CAA officials claimed that Lamont’s travel regulations, which force new entrants from 30 U.S. provinces and territories to quarantine for 14 days, have rendered Connecticut an undesirable and impractical location for anyone, including a large part of the world, to be reopened.
Lamont provided some support on the topic last week, as the criteria for self-quarantine had been changed to exclude travelers who had been screened negative for COVID-19 during three days of arrival throughout the state.
Are the current routes going to be profitable?
Both four of the routes that low-cost airlines JetBlue adds from Hartford have seen nonstop operation to some extent in the last three years. Even before the pandemic, the airport already dropped its persistent connection to Las Vegas and San Francisco and had occasional flights to Cancun and Los Angeles. It is not easy to make Hartford’s transcontinental operation work practice because this is a medium-sized sector.
As a result, investors might reasonably question if JetBlue will be able to make a return itself on new routes from Bradley International Airport. Throughout the short term, the response is that JetBlue needs to deploy resources on flights that will offset their rising costs and contribute to the airline’s fixed costs. Management does not generally assume that all proposed services would be sustainable on a strictly allocated framework.
Looking forward, the viability of these new routes – like most of the several transcontinental routes revealed earlier in the month – is likely to rely mostly on the usage of the Airbus A220-300s that will start entering the JetBlue fleet later this year. Due to its incredibly fuel-efficient and low maintenance requirements, the A220-300 would enable JetBlue to fly transcontinental destinations with much-reduced travel costs than it or its rivals have traditionally been capable of achieving.
Through releasing a set of new transcontinental routes at the end of 2020, JetBlue will produce information that will support it to determine which routes deliver the most lucrative long-term growth possibilities. Self-sustaining profitability does not arrive before JetBlue starts utilizing the ultra-efficient A220-300 to service these routes.
