By: David Pelter, VP of Pricing
In the world of airline economics, the name of the game is keep your costs low and be efficient. Here’s how it works at an airline:
A. Pack an airplane with seats and
B. Fly that airplane as many hours per day as possible
This way you are maximizing the ability to generate revenue from as many seats as possible and making it easier to recover your costs. Hence the lack of personal space at 30,000 feet.
It’s not that airlines haven’t tried to make money using other seat layout formulas. For example, over the past 10 years, in two separate experiments, both American and TWA took seats off their planes to increase legroom. The hope was that more legroom would translate into more loyalty and incremental revenue. Unfortunately, particularly for your legs, consumers in both instances were not willing to pay the $5 or $10 more to make up for the previously removed seats and the seats were put back on.
With that background, it’s even more surprising to learn that JetBlue has decided to remove one row of seats from its primary airplane, the Airbus A320. As a result, this creates more customer legroom, or “seat pitch” (the distance between the seats).
In JetBlue’s case, this takes the minimum seat pitch from 32” to 34”. While that doesn’t sound like much, those extra few inches definitely make a difference. To give you a point of comparison, other than Frontier and Midwest Airlines (two high quality medium sized airlines), no other domestic airlines offers a seat pitch greater than 32”. To top it off, depending on where you sit on the plane, JetBlue’s pitch can be as much as 36”. Talk about a little extra space.
BTW, JetBlue did not make the decision to remove the seats purely as a holiday act of kindness. By removing one row, the airline will now fly with 150 (vs. 156) total seats. This is important because the FAA mandates that airlines fly with at least one flight attendant per 50 seats. Thus, by reducing from 156 to 150 seats, JetBlue no longer has to pay for a 4th flight attendant. Also, fewer seats equal less weight, which in turn reduces fuel burn and lowers costs even more.
It’s not often we witness such a pro-consumer act of goodwill that will affect nearly traveler on a JetBlue. Regardless of their motive, kudos to the JetBlue team.