More trouble (and stranded passengers) for JetBlue

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More trouble (and stranded passengers) for JetBlue

Posted February 26, 2007 at 2:44 pm ET by Josh Roberts,
SmarterTravel . com Staff

Seat-back TVs featuring 36 channels of DIRECTV on JetBlue's Airbus
A320s (Photo: JetBlue)

It was snowing when I woke up this morning, so naturally my first
thought was about JetBlue's recent trouble with winter weather. (OK,
maybe not my first thought-that was probably more of the "do I have to
shovel the driveway to get at my car?" variety-but after that, I began
to wonder how JetBlue's freshly minted customer bill of rights would
hold up to its first real test.)

Passengers from at least 68 flights will have a chance to find out,
because that's the number of flights canceled by the airline today due
to the wintry weather. Of course, 68 is nothing compared to the 1,000
affected during the ice storm two weeks ago.
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And while there reportedly were no 11-hour delays on the tarmac this
time, at least one flight (New York to Raleigh) sat on the runway for
nearly three hours before being canceled.

"We were waiting on the plane for so long," says 22-year-old Duke
University student Segun Akande in an AP report. "You would think they
would tell us to go back to the terminal after an hour or two."

Yes, you probably would think that; given the PR hit JetBlue has taken
recently, if I were running that airline I'd be hyper-sensitive to
customer perceptions right now.

That said, though, let's take a step back and look at JetBlue on the
whole. It's been interesting and somewhat disheartening to see the
media and occasional industry blowhard pile on JetBlue this past week,
when in reality it's not like this is an airline with typically bad
customer relations-just the opposite, in fact. JetBlue is one of the
few carriers that really seems to "get it" most of the time.

Clearly there are still kinks left to work out in the big plan, but if
I had to put my money on any one airline to figure things out in the
end, well, I'd bet the house on JetBlue.

More blog entries
* w w w .smartertravel . com /blogs/today-in-travel/

* w w w .smartertravel . com /blogs/today-in-travel/more-trouble-and-stranded-passengers-for-jetblue.html?id#21747&source=dealalert&value 07-03-01&u=SL4F6B4DC5

>
> And while there reportedly were no 11-hour delays on the tarmac this
> time, at least one flight (New York to Raleigh) sat on the runway for
> nearly three hours before being canceled.

Please... three hours compared with 11 is not even close.