Lunch with Jet Blue
JetBlue was founded in 1999 by several Southwest Airlines employees that sought to provide a low-cost carrier with high-value amenities such as Satellite Radio and in-flight entertainment. Today JetBlue flies to 52 destinations in 7 different countries. Each carrier is built out with individual TV’s at every seat offering 36 channels of DirectTV, 100 channels of XM satellite Radio, Fox TV programs and 20th Century Fox movies.
I have always admired Jet Blue’s approach to flying so I was excited to meet some of them at their headquarters in New York City on our last trip. Dan, Austin and I took a field trip over to Queens to spend the afternoon with executives from the loyalty and distribution side of the house. Before the lunch meetings commenced, we were fortunate to get an extended tour of JetBlue from Kim Ruvolo, a former employee at Frontier who used to work for Dan. It was interesting to see the Control Room (where all of the flight negotiation and tracking takes place) as well as to meet several other former Frontier employees who knew Dan. Kim is the Brand Manager for JetBlue and she even gave us some JetBlue memorabilia to take home (thanks, Kim!)
Our scheduled meetings were with David Canty, Director of Loyalty Marketing for TrueBlue, Michael Stromer, Director of Interactive Marketing and David Levy. We had lunch delivered to their offices and holed up in a conference room to introduce Travelfli and learn more about their respective positions at JetBlue.
David Canty came on board in 2007 to launch the TrueBlue loyalty program after spending 11 years with Starwood hotels as their loyalty program director. The program is run entirely online and points are awarded in 2, 4, or 6-point increments, based on the distance of the flight. David also manages all of the loyalty email communications to members as well as retail emails. He is a firm believer that “redemption breeds loyalty” and he’s starting to see more and more data in support of this belief. We couldn’t be in more agreement with David, and we were particularly excited to see his great reaction to our product. After the demo he remarked, “That’s pretty cool. I like it!” It’s extremely rewarding to hear such positive feedback from literally one of the top experts in the loyalty industry for both hotel and airline programs. David’s emphasis moving forward is on partnerships and several other measures to give customers even more value out of the program.
Mike’s Interactive Marketing Department oversees JetBlue.com, distribution, including search, affiliate and online marketing, and advertising/brand identity. According to Mike, JetBlue changed their philosophy about a year and a half ago and started opening up their content to third party distribution. Their philosophy is basically all or nothing and they understand the need to be where their customers are. Their goal is to keep transaction costs as low as possible, so Travelfli’s business model was more attractive than a traditional OTA model. Both gentlemen provided us with some really great ideas for new features and functionality on the site, as well as a road map for partnering with JetBlue moving forward.
Overall, it was a great meeting and we learned a ton from everybody we met. We are looking forward to a bright future with JetBlue and can’t wait to work with them. Special thanks to Kim, David, David, Michael and Ian for taking the time to meet with us!
