March 20, 2012

Lastest Offbeat JetBlue Idea

We try yo get JetBlue to give us some flights to Florida.  We tell them to charge $50-$75 more each way then they would out of Boston.  Between the convenience, parking fees, gas and tolls people in the Central Mass Catchment area would fly out of ORH.   Figure 140 people times $50 that is $7,000 more to each way to JetBlue's bottom line for the same flight out of Bostoon, not to mention ORH would most like waive fees.

We need to appeal to JetBlue and show them how ORH can be a more lucrative route !!!!

6 comments:

jose said...

bill, you should make an appeal to whom ever it needs to go to to get jet blue to fly flights out of orh. its not like orh has to compete with logan. im sure a couple of florida routes, san juan, and maybe 1 or 2 regional routes like ny, dc, philly, or niagara falls. the popular tourist destinations.

kloc12 said...

If they flew to Pittsburgh, I know a lot of people would be interested. There are a lot of Pittsburgh Natives and plus Pittsburgh is a great international airport for many central mass plus surrounding states to fly from worcester to the burgh! I will keep fingers crossed this happens!!

Steve Foley said...

The $7000 won't go straight to the bottom line. There are costs associated with providing service at another airport.

Passengers have always had the opportunity to walk up to the airport counter and buy a ticket. Will Jetblue staff a counter full time? What is that cost?

Will Jetblue hire their own gate agents and luggage handlers, or will they farm that out to Swissport?

I would guess minimum staffing would be one full time station manager, a part time gate agent, and two part time luggage handlers. What is the cost of that?

Who pays the TSA gropers? You can't board a plane until you've been properly groped by the TSA.

You'll also need a real police officer on duty during the turnaround to keep people from stopping in the white zone in front of the terminal, and to handle complaints of improperly trained TSA gropers violating the rights of the passengers.

They should also plan a contingency for the couple of times a month that the plane can't land at ORH due to weather, and is diverted to BOS. That would probably involve two buses. One for the departing passengers and another for the arriving passengers. They could use just one, but that would make force the arriving passengers to wait for the bus that would leave Worcester at the planned departure time of the flight, and take at least an hour en route.

I'm sure there are other costs that I'm missing.

Bill Randell said...

Steve

All the costs you mention they incur at Boston or any airport they fly out of. They are not unique to ORH..

In fact if we waived the same fees that we did to Direct Air (Landing fees and some others), their overhead may even be less.

Bill

jose said...

what i cant understand is that worcester is the 2nd largest city in new england. bigger then providence, hartford, or manchester. worcester has the dcu center, all those colleges, ahl cam-am league teams, the heart of the commonwealth and probably new england too, and yet massport cant get anyone to fly out of orh. at its hight 350,000 people flew out of worcester. what happened and whats going on? i understand the airline industry has been hurt by high taxes, rising fuel and labor costs, and declining customers. how many people live close enough to worcester in mass, connecticut, vermont, maybe even northwestern ri along 146 who would prefer to fly out of worcester? easily half a million in that radius. in my opinion massport only cares about boston. they choose manchester over worcester.

Nick said...

Wouldn't JetBlue fly the E190s (100 people) out of Worcester instead of their 150-seat A320s?