JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes: Offsets a bridging strategy, not long term

Talking at the CAPA Live on 13-Oct-2021, JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes spoke with Korn Ferry's Senior Client Partner Michael Bell. Some of the key highlights can be found below.

When we got into the summer, everyone was ready to travel. We actually had the biggest ramp up of capacity from the first half of the year into Q3 of any US airline.

The most confusing thing for people is just the amount of restrictions or paperwork or testing that needs to happen. And every country is different.

Last year we certainly pivoted our network towards places that people wanted to fly. During the whole of COVID we announced over a hundred new routes.

Had you said to me in a normal year, could you make that sort of change in the time you did, I'd have said you're crazy. But like so many things with COVID, we kind of learned we could do things we didn't think we could do.

So for business class to the UK customers can fly in a private suite round trip with fares starting under USD2,000, I mean, there's a lot of value right there.

One of the biggest frustrations that we had as JetBlue is our inability to grow further in the congested New York market. And then COVID came and the opportunity to do the partnership with American Airlines came along.

So we are all agreed on the goal of 2050 for carbon neutrality. And I wouldn't be surprised if that comes forward again further. The question is what is the path?

We've got to make sure that we scale up sustainable aviation fuel. We've got to make sure that there is a path to generating synthetic fuels in an efficient way from a sort of a power assumption.