Back in June I think JetBlue surprised all of us by announcing that they'd be adding a competitive business class product to their transcontinental flights between New York and Los Angeles/San Francisco. In August they shared a video of the new business class, which looked quite nice given the staggered configuration and that seats in…
Continue reading: JetBlue unveils more details about new premium transcontinental “Mint” cabin
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
The WiFi will be provided by ViaSat's ka-band satellite, so even if everyone is surfing the web, the experience should be far better than anything we have today.
More here: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/24/inside-jetblue-fly-fi/
You meant to say they are selling for flights starting June 15, 2014 and not 2013
I agree that the price will most likely be much higher after they grab some of the premium market share.
Jetblue rocks. I wish they had a decent FF program and were in an alliance. If it were so I would be flying them exclusively in the US.
"So they’re choosing to have 16 Mint seats in place of at least 42 coach seats, so selling them at $599 each way just doesn’t make sense for them."
I'm not so sure this is that straightforward. At the $599 pricing, JetBlue would need to charge $228 for the equivalent fraction of economy seats to reach the same revenue. And given your picture, JetBlue is already charging less than that for economy.
Things get even more murky if you think about load factors. But, I'm going to guess that there isn't the demand for 42 more seats at the same revenue rates.
Like Mike C. pointed out above, 16 seats @ $599/e. is an equivalent to 42 seats @ $228 which is in line with JB one-way fare prices shown above, so theoretically JB can break even assuming full capacity.
Now, there are obviously all sorts of different considerations that went into making decisions about Mint than straight-up 42 Economy vs 16 Mint revenue comparison.
@ Alex
True you can but only on a very limited selection of flights.
http://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/earnMiles/travel/airlines/jetBlue.jsp?anchorLocation=DirectURL&title=jetblue
Here's hoping that the mileage requirements will at least be reasonable to the competition as well.
as a Bostonian, i wanna see more of these mint flights come to BOS-LAX and BOS-SFO flights. NY-Cal market has all the fun equipment... 🙁
Thanks for sharing, Lucky! I had around $200 JetBlue travelcredits I needed to use by May 2014 and thus bought a Mint seat this morning (am I crazy?) Most of the dates have all 4 solo suite seats taken already, unfortunately.
All the flights during the promo are dayflights versus red-eyes which I thought was interesting.
And actually, not only is JetBlue's wifi faster, but they also have a lot fewer seats on this plane than UA or AA do on their normal (non-premium-transcon) 757s:
http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/JetBlue_Airways/Jetblue_Airways_Airbus_A321_transcon.php
http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/American_Airlines/American_Airlines_Boeing_757-200_MCE_new.php
http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/United_Airlines/United_Airlines_Boeing_757-200_A_After09JUN11.php
JetBlue gives a LOT more legroom in coach than the majors do...