Why Is JetBlue Offering $52 Fares?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Why Is JetBlue Offering $52 Fares?

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[cnxvideo id=”510063″ placement=”ros”]JetBlue Airways Corp. (NASDAQ: JBLU) has fares from New York’s JFK to Boston for as little as $52 one way. The deal is extraordinary, because ticket prices for shuttles between the two cities can be in the hundreds of dollars. JetBlue has some method to what appears to be madness.

One cost that can be added to the fare, in most cases, is for extras, particularly luggage. For some fares, travelers need to add $30 for the first piece of luggage and up to $100 for three. Airlines make huge sums on increased fees, which they did not do over a decade ago, before they discovered what a huge bonanza the fees can be.

Second, the low fare comes with potentially high cancellation fees. For fares under $100, changes in a flight cost $70 plus the difference for the new fare.

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The low fare also draws thrifty flyers from the shuttles that run out of New York City’s La Guardia Airport. One of JetBlue’s large hubs is JFK, which is further from much of the city than La Guardia.

As always, low fares are a prime way to sell seats. Presumably, the JetBlue flights between JFK and Boston are not full most days. One of the most important rules of the airline industry is that an unsold seat on single flight at a single hour on a single day is the loss of a sale that will never be made in the future.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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