Loading
Recorded at CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas, 3-4 Apr 2025

Airline Leader Interview - Breeze Chairman & CEO David Neeleman

David Neeleman is that rarest of entrepreneurs, a man who has created and launched a multitude of successful, independent airlines, including the USA's Breeze Airways, JetBlue and Morris Air (later sold to Southwest), Canada's WestJet and Brazil's Azul. David was born in Brazil while his father was Reuter's São Paulo Bureau Chief. His family moved to Utah while he was still a child. His career began in 1984 when he co-founded a low-fare carrier called Morris Air with June Morris, the owner of Salt Lake City-based travel agency Morris Travel. As President of Morris Air, David implemented the industry's first electronic ticketing system and pioneered a home reservation system where calls are handled by reservationists working from their homes. Following the sale of Morris Air and a short period with Southwest Airlines, David took the electronic ticketing system that he had initiated at Morris Air and developed it to become Open Skies, the world's simplest airline reservation system. David sold Open Skies to Hewlett Packard in 1999. Also during this period, David acted as a consultant to WestJet Airlines, the successful Canadian low-fare start-up airline. David then founded JetBlue Airways in New York and spent a decade as Chief Executive Officer (1998 to 2007) and Chairman (2002 to 2008). An amazing success by any measure, JetBlue was an instant hit with travelers and was the first airline to earn $100 million annually within five years, thus becoming a "major" airline fastest. JetBlue has won countless awards and accolades including Top Low Cost Airline for Customer Satisfaction by J.D. Power and Associates and Best Airline by Consumer Reports. It won Conde Nast Traveler's Readers Choice Awards for Best U.S. Airline for seven consecutive years.

Transcript

Dr. Joe Leder:It's very rare that you get to meet on stage with an industry icon. David Neeleman has founded 5 different airlines across the Americas, and they've disrupted the industry each and every time, from Morris Air to WestJet, JetBlue to Azul. and now Breeze. David Neeleman has shown an uncanny ability to take his ideas and turn them into scalable reality. So with that introduction, he's now built the nicest of all of his airlines, as he likes to say. It's an amazing airline. I have loved flying it, and I wanted to have a very warm welcome to the stage, David Neeleman. David. Thanks so much.

Audience:Thank you.

David Neeleman:You can sit here.

Audience:There we go.

Dr. Joe Leder:Oh, of course. So as we begin, it's, um, you know, you look at what we had 4 years ago. You and I were on the first ever Breeze flight, and amazing experience out of Tampa. And you've since then taken Breeze to profitability faster than nearly any U.S. airline in its class over the years.

David Neeleman:JetBlue went A lot faster.

Dr. Joe Leder:Did it really?

David Neeleman:Oh yeah.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's remarkable. So if you look at this, this— but this is against a different backdrop. We see all of these LCCs and ULCCs struggling, and you are not. We've seen hybrids struggling. So what have you done so differently, and why is Breeze reaching success when others are really having a lot of trouble in the marketplace?

David Neeleman:Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question, and I always get the question is What's different about the US than Europe? Ryanair continues to thrive in Europe, and why is— why are the ULCCs struggling so much in the US? It's a good question. The ULCCs in the US thought that they could, if they just went with a lower and lower chasm, if they could just lower, lower, lower, and the easiest way to lower chasm Because they're basically paying the same for airplanes, actually more probably than say United. Their pilot salaries came up, they're buying fuel for the same price or actually more, you know, maybe paying more even for ground handling because it's contracted out. So really the only way they could do that is to stuff more and more seats in an airplane. That's really the only thing they could do to be able to lower their available seat-mile cost. And then they thought, with the lowest seat mile cost, I can just go against any airline in any market and do whatever I want to. And that's a little bit different. That's the difference between Ryanair. Ryanair didn't go to Heathrow. They didn't go straight to Charles de Gaulle. They didn't go straight into the airports. You know, they said, hey, what about this little airport in the south of France outside of Toulouse? We'll develop our own market. Well, if you're going right at someone, right in their breadbasket every day, and you have a lot of smart people on the other side, the Scott Kirbys of the world, they're going to figure out a way to deal with it. The way that Scott Kirby and Delta and those guys dealt with the incursion by the ULCCs was to say, okay, got it. You've got your low fares. We're going to go bigger as well. We're going to get bigger airplanes. We're going to take a slice of that airplane, 20 to 30 seats, We're going to create basic economy, which is really kill Spirit class, and we're going to— we get those seats for cheaper than you have yours because these are incremental seats. And then we're going to match you on your product and how you do business, and we're not going to do it just twice a week, we're going to do it every day, and we're going to do it for 6 flights a day. And that became a real problem. for the ULCCs. You know, I always, when I'm in orientation, I write a couple numbers on the board, and one of them is 90% and 86%. And 86%, which is now 87%, is the routes where we have no nonstop competition. And the routes where— and 90% is the routes where Spirit has overlapping competition.

Audience:Wow.

David Neeleman:So it's a big difference. And I learned at Azul in Brazil where we have 87% of our routes where we have no nonstop competition. The routes where you have no competition, you just do better than the ones where you have competition. So it was a pretty easy formula. And then that coupled with the fact that, you know, people's attitudes changed. You know, Southwest Airlines, I was at Southwest. The first airline I started was Morris Air, and I idolized Southwest. I was in love with Southwest. I had their annual report. And when Herb came to see me for the first time, I had the Southwest annual report and a Bible together. Those were the two, my two things that I read. And he goes, yeah, and it was fun. It was exciting. You run for a seat. The fares are $29. Wow, Southwest is coming to town. That's really great. Well, fast forward 30 years, and now it's kind of like, I really hate running for my seat. Can't you give me a seat assignment? And thank you for giving me free bags, but I just want a lower fare. I don't want free bags. So, you know, and part of it was kind of our genius. Part of it was just luck, where when I looked at the U.S. market, I don't really start airlines for the sake of starting them. I just, you know, it's just too brutal to just say, let's start an airline. I don't care what we do. You have to find something that Something that is defendable, something that is— something that you can actually— a mousetrap that's very difficult to match.

Audience:Right.

David Neeleman:So it all started with the 220, with a lower trip cost than a 321, 20 to 25% lower trip cost. And then an aircraft that you could actually do premium seating that was very efficient. So, you know, we have 3-2 seating, so we just take one seat out per row. which is half of what those other guys do. And then we could do it on a quick change overnight. You know, I love the E2, and we have the E2 down in Brazil. It's a great airplane. But I can't go premium seating and change overnight because the overhead bins have to change. Where with the 220, I can go from 12 seats to 16 seats to 36 seats, and I can do that change overnight. And so I have options for kind of a A first-class cabin, then I can say extra legroom cabins, and then I can have a basic economy with a 29-inch pitch. So I can say, okay, here's a $49 fare, but if you want to pay me $99, I'll give you free carry-on, free checked baggage, 2 extra inches of leg— 3 extra inches of legroom, and I'll even give you free Wi-Fi. People go, let's do it. So that segmentation, which the big guys are doing, Works on the smaller level too, and that's driven really, really interesting. We have the highest ancillary revenues in the industry and the highest NPS score, which are usually— those things don't go hand in hand.

Dr. Joe Leder:What's your NPS at right now?

David Neeleman:Depends if we're on time. When we're in the 80s of on time, which we're pushing, and we were in the 90s yesterday, it's over 70. If we get down to 60% on time, then it drops in the high 50s and low 60s.

Dr. Joe Leder:When you talk about the ability on the 220 to switch out seats, David, like, so you went from 26 seats, you're down to 12 in most cases now.

David Neeleman:Looking at 16.

Dr. Joe Leder:Looking at 16. Do you try that out? Do you do overnights where you say, you know what, we are out of nicest seats and we're going to go ahead and swap out on these routes because there's a demand? You wait for a bigger move.

David Neeleman:Yeah, we wait for a bigger move. It's, you know, there's a big correlation between the length of the flight and our ability to kind of sell those seats as opposed to if you're just going for an hour or an hour and a half flight, it's not that big of a deal. But if you're going transcon like we do, lots of our flights are transcon, then you do. But what we found, our flights are kind of going shorter and shorter because We figure if we get paid $150 to fly an hour and a half or 4 hours, we'd rather take the flight that we can fly an hour and a half. It just makes more sense.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's actually one of my key questions is you've realized that your transcons are not getting the RASM in comparison to your shorter hops. Are you going to shift to more shorter hop flying and less transcons as you continue to build out your strategy, or is there a Provo to Grand Cayman flight That'd be great.

David Neeleman:I did come solely to Grand Cayman thanks to Brett Smith over there. So that was awesome. But no, you know, I think it's more seasonal. There are seasonal— there are months of the year that we do great transcon, and it's comparative to anything we do short haul. So I think we've just been more aggressive at pulling back in the off-season. And it complements with our north-south business of snowbirds and then more east-west in the wintertime. So you'll find longer hauls in the summertime and shorter in the winters. The other thing that's really interesting is that we're looking at these migration patterns in the US. And I was reading an article in the New York Times where I I think it was the— it was talking about inbound migration and which states had the most. And South and North Carolina were either 2nd and 3rd or 3rd and 4th. And 75% of our ads in the summer were in the Carolinas.

Dr. Joe Leder:Huh.

David Neeleman:So there's a big migration moving from kind of Northeast to Carolinas. And then once you're down there, you're like, I wanna go back and visit my grandma, or I wanna go to a funeral or a baptism or a wedding. Something, so you create all this VFR traffic, which is really working well for us. As long as you don't have to stop over a hub, and if you can get there in an hour and a half versus 4 hours, and you can pay less, you're just going to go like 4 or 5 times more often.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's one of my questions. There's the breeze-through where you go from basically the aircraft stops, but you don't get off the plane. As you continue to grow, you've made incredible revenue with that model because you don't have to worry about connecting passengers and the economics of that. As you continue to grow, do you see a potential path where, you know what, we have enough density here where it makes sense to maximize revenue and to have some connecting passengers, or is that much further out than that?

David Neeleman:Yeah, I mean, we do a little bit of connections. You know, we're just, you know, we fly Provo to Salt Lake 3 times a week. We're gonna start doing that daily. And then it, you know, we have a lot of destinations out And people in Utah are notoriously cheap. They're very thrifty because they just— that's just cultural. So if you can fly to Orlando and then lay over and fly up to Lancaster, Pennsylvania or something, there's— you add twosies and threesies on that, that makes sense. But for the most part, the breeze-throughs are just much better, more efficient.

Audience:Yeah.

David Neeleman:operationally, we don't have to worry about misconnecting people. So that's gonna be the, that's gonna be the thought. You know, it's BreezeThru, the capital of our BreezeThrus is really Raleigh. This summer we'll have 16 daily BreezeThrus every day.

Audience:Wow.

David Neeleman:So that, that what that does is it allows people in Raleigh to go south. It allows people from the Northeast to come to Raleigh. Then if you want to breeze through to go to a secondary or tertiary city from Florida, you can do that as well. It's a great model and it's working really well.

Dr. Joe Leder:Connecting flights via Salt Lake City in select cities where it makes sense, like Provo-Salt Lake, and just doing that in certain markets is what you're saying, David?

David Neeleman:Yeah. You can look at where we have really inefficient schedules. You can actually do those connections. We don't really push them. We're also, you know, with our schedule, increased schedule, Azul has a lot of flights. There's a big connection between Salt Lake and Brazil as well. A lot of people that have served missions down there, a lot of Brazilians that have migrated to Utah. So we're probably— our first connection with an international carrier will be with Azul, where we land in Orlando and Azul serves—

Audience:Brazil.

David Neeleman:Several cities. They do Recife, Belo Horizonte, Campinas. So we'll be able to connect people to Brazil for a really attractive price as well.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's great. So it'll be combined into one fare with Breeze?

Audience:Yeah.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's incredible. Because Orlando, if you— I was really admiring also your addition of Key West recently from Orlando. So that was a strategic addition. Normally in the airline industry, the one thing I've learned is the empire will always strike back. So when you're running 87% of your routes without competition, sometimes you'll go into city where, like Provo to Dallas-Fort Worth, and then of course American's going to put flights on that. Has that basically pushed you back or has that encouraged the marketplace?

David Neeleman:No, it actually encouraged it. It was great because it put Provo on the map.

Audience:We were—

David Neeleman:so we added 2 flights a week from Provo to Dallas. And there's a big community of interest between the two with BYU and Dallas. So we were doing okay on it. It was kind of break-even. The minute American added 3 flights a day, it became instantly profitable because it became— it was like a mall where you're adding different stores and people now coming to that mall. And so we found that people would fly one way on us and come back on them. And, you know, kind of noticed that they've stepped back now. They've added 3 flights a day. Now they're back to 2. I think we're probably having more fun doing that than maybe they are, so we'll see how that goes.

Dr. Joe Leder:Well, that's good. I mean, in terms of how this works out over time, do you see any potential bottlenecks? I mean, you have so many 220s coming in. Luckily, you haven't had any engine issues, knock on wood, yet. But do you see a runout of city pairs where you're able to— are you going to be able to keep your ratio? of connecting cities that aren't connected at around 87%.

David Neeleman:Yeah, yeah, for sure. We added 29 cities last year. We're up to 70 cities, so it's, it's a lot, and we'll probably only add about 10 this year, but then it creates a myriad of connecting the dot opportunities, which makes us more efficient.

Dr. Joe Leder:Yeah, in terms of connecting the dots, one of the favorite dots that you connected last year was in, I would say, the most contentious Onstage interaction with IATA CEO Willie Walsh on the issue of SAF. Why do you believe that SAF is not viable and not the path the industry should go down?

David Neeleman:It's really one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. I mean, it's like the emperor has no clothes. And it's like, you know, I mean, with all due respect to the Minister of Tourism that spoke this morning, He spoke on one hand about we live on aviation, we can't— aviation is our lifeblood, aviation is all this stuff. And then on the other hand, it's like, but you need to go get SAF. It's like, are you kidding me? I mean, if we were mandated to have SAF, this poor island would suffer tremendously. There would be 2/3 less people traveling in the world. Most of the people in this room wouldn't even have a job. I mean, it's just the most ridiculous thing that was ever invented. Is hydrogen or something that comes along that can be economical— I drive a Tesla, hasn't been keyed yet. But I love my Tesla, and it makes economic sense for me to drive my Tesla. I plug it in, I don't have to smell gasoline, I don't have to get— my hands don't have to stink. It's actually cheaper for me to drive it. It costs a really good price. And so that makes total sense. But when you suspend something in the air, it uses a disproportionate amount of fuel.

Dr. Joe Leder:Yes.

David Neeleman:Now, if we can take some of that— I was on stage with Willie and it was like 100— he said, we're gonna The industry's making about $20 billion a year, and if we went SAF, it'd be $167 billion a year. I said, like, are you kidding me? And then I tried to repeat it. I said $165, and he goes, no, it's $167. And it makes no economic sense. So if we took $10 billion and we took— where I am concerned over time, if we go electric, if you cut a barrel of oil only about 30% of it is distillate, which is heating oil or diesel fuel or what we have. So I think the smartest thing for our industry to do is to say, okay, why don't we— we can take some— let us self-monitor. We'll take a certain tax, a $5-a-person tax, and let us subsidize or help Convert all the other people using distillates to some other form of energy. Because if everything goes electric and all the refineries go out of business, then diesel fuel is going to go straight up.

Dr. Joe Leder:Right.

David Neeleman:So in the meantime, if we can help diesel trucks or power generation facilities, all that kind of stuff, put $10 billion a year into converting all that to electric or Or some other solar, whatever, then that would help our industry. That'd be a much more productive way to deal with it than just mandating something that affects our food supply that has no economic benefit for an incremental gain that is absolutely done for political reasons and has no basis in reality.

Dr. Joe Leder:What do you think aviation should do on the— for the environment, on the environmental front?

David Neeleman:Recycle our cans on board the aircraft.

Dr. Joe Leder:No.

David Neeleman:No, what I explained to you, I think if you're going to— if you take from the European carriers, and it was interesting, that conference was in Amsterdam, and I had Willie on one side, and then I had the CEO of KLM on the other side, and obviously they have to toe the party line. Then I saw Willie speak at ISTAT, and it was like they had replaced him with an identical guy that looked just like Willie, but it was— wasn't what Willie was saying. I said— and he goes, what are you talking about? And I said, well, you're talking about how SAF doesn't work, and over in Amsterdam he was singing a completely different song. But, you know, I think if you took all that 10% mandate in Europe and you took what that cost was and cut it in half or cut it by 75% and had the airlines agree to take that money and help subsidize other distillate producers that make economic sense.

Dr. Joe Leder:Right.

David Neeleman:Like an electric truck coming down the highway. As long as you're doing that, then make sure that it's autonomous.

Dr. Joe Leder:As you joke about recycling on board, one of the things that we at APEX have seen across all of our airlines is you actually increase your net promoter score more if you're recycling cans than if you have sustainable aviation fuel in the aircraft. It's all about customer perception.

David Neeleman:Perception, yeah.

Dr. Joe Leder:One of my questions is, You, in your product, in your brand promise to have an NPS score in the 80s, you provide so many perks that airlines don't. You, to your nicest and nicer customers, you give free Wi-Fi without requiring membership in your rewards program. You do above and beyond.

Audience:What is—

Dr. Joe Leder:what do you think are the best drivers for your Net Promoter Score?

David Neeleman:Um, you know, I'll answer that, but let me just go back to the, the thing about the— what the what our guests think about the environment. At Azul, we have a deal where you can actually pay an extra $10 or $20 on every ticket, and then we'll go plant some trees in the Amazon for you. The take rate on that is almost zero. People don't, they won't pay for it.

Audience:Right.

David Neeleman:And they don't care. The politicians care, but you can see the numbers that hardly anybody wants to plant trees in the Amazon, Doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage that. Now back to the Net Promoter Score. You know, I think people just love choice and options. They love the fact that, you know, like I said earlier, you can pay a price and get all this stuff included. They love, and it's really hard, I think they love going nonstop. They love, you know, if your grandma When we announced Charleston the first time, interesting, I— we're in the— because FAA delays in getting our certification, and we announced 6 days before we started flying, we announced the fares and the schedules. And I said to the people in Charleston when I was there, I said, there are a lot of people going to come to Charleston, South Carolina this summer that have no idea they're going to be coming Yeah. To Charleston. And that July, like basically 6 weeks later, was the busiest month in the history of Charleston Airport. And it was because we added our flights and people matched fares and generated a lot of traffic. But when I was there, I met a lady whose mother lives in New Orleans, and that was one of our nonstop routes that nobody else flew. And she said, you know what, I don't go see my mother enough. I know that it'll arrive a day that she's not gonna be here with me, and I know I'm gonna regret it. But with your fares and the convenience of your schedule, I'm gonna go see her every single month instead of once a year. Thank you so much. You're changing my life. So I think that person knowing that they can go for an hour flight, an hour and 15 minutes, see their mother, go Friday afternoon after work, be back Monday morning, and be able to go see that and have that, you know, relieved. You know, and it resonated with me because I just lost my father. You know, I wish I would have even gotten to see him more than I did, and I did quite a bit. So it's those kind of connections that make people really thrilled that they can just go more often, more conveniently. We have just a high— you know, we fly Vero Beach, and there's a really high percentage of people that fly Vero Beach that have second homes. And And that number keeps going up. People keep buying homes with the real estate market in Florida kind of down.

Audience:Yep.

David Neeleman:Well, you have service there. They're all flying down to buy homes in Vero Beach because it's so convenient to go back and forth, for example.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's incredible. Jumping back to the NPS question, so what on board drives your customer satisfaction so much beyond the nonstop routes that you serve? And in terms of, have you found it to be Wi-Fi, food and beverage offering, your Obviously, your people are incredible. What's the number one driver from your perspective?

David Neeleman:I think it's our people because the food and beverage isn't great, honestly. It's something we're attacking. Being able to cater planes in all these places and charging $5 for a peanut M&M, that's not great. We haven't gotten to the point— I would love to get to the point where we send out One of the great things about Breeze is that we don't allow anyone to book with us unless we get their contact information. So when we have a delay or hardly ever a cancellation or something, we talk to our people. If a flight's more than 15 minutes late, we're sending them messages and updates and telling the story of why the flight's late. And so having that connection is really important. I think that's probably part of it because If a plane's headed to Fort Myers in the morning, it diverts over to Tampa because there's fog, flight's now 2 hours late, it's going to delay 6 flights the rest of the day 2 hours. If you're sitting at home in Providence, Rhode Island, and you get, hey, you're going at 6 instead of 4, you get the message, you're like, that's okay. I'll just go to the airport 2 hours later. I think that helps. You know, really the, the net promoter score. But also, we're doing— we're really a lot better. I get, I get a health monitoring of our Wi-Fi system every day. I get a report on that every single day. We have 3 planes without Wi-Fi installed, and they will be installed in the month of May, next month. And, and so we're 99.9. So those things that you monitor and those things that you report on and shed light on Just get better. We started practice on the 1st of April where we asked our pilots to come in 15 minutes earlier with our flight attendants, and now every flight we're tracking -10 on STAR in the morning. 78% of our flights yesterday left more than 10 or more minutes early.

Dr. Joe Leder:Wow.

David Neeleman:Then the on-time percentage for the day was 88%. It's just those little details. Where people, you communicate with them, you fly on time, you have great people on board that take care of the people, the Wi-Fi's working, and then you don't feel so bad about paying $5 for a package of peanut M&Ms.

Dr. Joe Leder:Is your Wi-Fi sufficient for your customers to all stream and be happy with it? What's the feedback on performance?

David Neeleman:Yeah, it's good. I mean, obviously it's intermittent at times. We have ViaSat. But, you know, we're monitoring it and we are in constant contact with Viasat on up and availability. And, you know, with United, I think a lot of airlines went on Viasat really quickly and then they lost a satellite. So that was challenging. But with United going to Starlink and stuff, it should take some pressure off it.

Dr. Joe Leder:Yeah, in terms of that switch with Starlink, and you made a comment earlier about your Tesla, Um, do you— I mean, like, it's fascinating because watching what can happen in the future of aviation and the number of companies that are looking at Starlink, do you think that there'll be any— do— will airlines simply, from your perspective, look at what's best of the options out there, or do you think they'll begin to be a little bit of political bias?

David Neeleman:No, I don't think there'll be any political bias. I think it's just what's best. And having a LEO, a low-orbiting satellite, It's just better. It just doesn't have to go so far up. The messages and the coverage area of launching, what, 2,500 satellites or something, is going to be better. I think, I think the future is in LEOs for sure.

Dr. Joe Leder:Very good. One of the things on the political front that you were— I really admired that you spoke about DEI from out in the audience earlier. What are your thoughts in terms of— I know you want— you like diversity, but you also want the most qualified people. How do you balance that with than Breeze?

David Neeleman:Well, you know, it was discussed quite a bit on the last panel, and same as you, we have, we have no quotas. We've never had a quota. I think, you know, coming out and saying, I want 50% of my pilots to be, you know, female or, you know, non-white men, basically, I just think that's crazy. I mean, certainly we want to incentivize flight schools and talk about career in aviation and all that, but when it comes to safety? For heaven's sakes, no quotas. That's crazy. You want, I mean, you want to get in that airplane knowing that the best qualified person is piloting that airplane or maintaining that airplane at night, and you could care less about diversity in that case. Now, do we, we hire, we're very diverse. We hire great people. We have great female pilots, and, but they are, they are They are not because they're female. It's because they're very skilled aviators and they passed our training with flying colors. And not— that has nothing to do with their gender or their skin color.

Dr. Joe Leder:I wanted to make sure if there are audience questions, please raise your hand and they do have a microphone that they can bring to you. So in our final few minutes, as we wrap up, David, one of the things I wanted to ask you, tell me about the Breeze from when we go 5 years out from now. What's it going to look like? It's 2030. How many aircraft do you think Breeze will have? How many cities? Also, what is your international presence? What are your aspirations there?

David Neeleman:When we looked— we started Breeze actually before COVID I had 55 people working at the company when we went into COVID. Didn't get any of that COVID largesse money, unfortunately, because we weren't operating an airline. The opportunity Just got bigger after COVID as the pilot salaries of the regional carriers doubled and all the 50-seat airplanes went away, and it just opened up more and more routes for us to, to, to go into. There's maybe half as many regional flights today as there was even 10 years ago. So that, that really is, is great for us and opens up. So we literally have hundreds of routes. We have 250 routes today. I think we're up to about 600 or 700 that we've identified that would work, you know, with the aircraft, including connecting the dots. So, you know, I think the future is really bright. As far as international, it's a process. We're going through the process. We're getting closer to doing the proving runs. And we do international charters today. We do lots of them. But to be a scheduled service And to be able to come down to the Caribbean and leave somebody off on a Saturday to go to an all-inclusive resort and come back and get them the next Saturday, we're really looking forward to that because Saturday is a little bit of a softer day. And if we can do that with all of our international, like on a Wednesday, Saturday, I think it's going to be really great. It's going to add a lot to our business and we're really looking forward to it.

Dr. Joe Leder:So for international, you would increase aircraft utilization, look to your Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturdays, and that way you don't need More aircraft.

David Neeleman:Yeah, we can charge less on those days and we can better utilize those planes.

Dr. Joe Leder:That's really well done.

David Neeleman:If you're coming with an all-inclusive package, it's really great.

Audience:Perfect.

Dr. Joe Leder:I need to do an audience check to see if there are any questions out in the audience. One right here, please. Oh, you have a microphone right behind you.

Audience:It's on?

David Neeleman:It's on.

Audience:Hey, Dave. Could you, I mean, with all your experience and what you have gone through the last decades, could you tell us in a minute what is your vision after the next decade for the industry?

David Neeleman:I don't know. I mean, I think the only thing I can, you know, it's a crazy business. Every time I have a weekly pilot call, every time I get on, I say, guys, You chose this crazy business. We're in it together. Let's make it work. You know, I just think when I started JetBlue, I've said this many times, it was a customer service company that happened to fly airplanes. And then Breeze, I changed that to a technology company happening to fly airplanes. And I think, you know, kind of technology going to super apps where someone, you know, it drives me crazy that you have, you know, like These hotels, Hotels.com and all these companies have a higher market cap. Priceline has a higher market cap than all the airlines combined. And nobody goes to book a hotel before they book an airline ticket. So if we could just create a super app that you could have all those options and combine all that revenue, I think it makes a lot of sense. And then AI is gonna be really big for our industry. Predictive maintenance, knowing your customer, serving up stuff. So those are all things that we're working on today.

Dr. Joe Leder:It's a great question.

David Neeleman:Thank you.

Dr. Joe Leder:Go ahead, please.

Audience:No, thank you. And I like also driving a Tesla as well. And I think that it's going to turn around with the situation that's going on right now. Great.

Dr. Joe Leder:Very good.

Audience:Thank you.

Dr. Joe Leder:And on that note, we went from 2030 to effectively 2035. So David, thank you so much for your leadership in the industry, thank you, is you told me 4 years ago that you got tapped to start yet another airline and you couldn't say no. So I'm so glad you said yes, you did this again, and congratulations on all of Breeze's success.

David Neeleman:Thank you.

Dr. Joe Leder:Warm round of applause.

Audience:Appreciate it.

Want More News Like This?

CAPA Membership provides access to all news and analysis on the site, along with access to many areas of our comprehensive databases and toolsets.
Find Out More