Business
JetBlue Provides Update Related To Coronavirus
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- JetBlue (NASDAQ: JBLU) today issued the following message to its 23,000 crewmembers. Dear Crewmembers, It has been a very tough
About this update from Jetblue Airways Corporation
[{"type":"text","content":" NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nJetBlue (NASDAQ: JBLU) today issued the following message to its 23,000 crewmembers.\n\n\nDear Crewmembers,\n\n\nIt has been a very tough few weeks. We are so proud to see once again how the JetBlue culture brings us together during times of crisis. Thank you for continuing to serve our Customers and deliver the JetBlue experience, particularly when your own lives are being disrupted in so many ways.\n\n\nWith safety our #1 value, we continue to take the measures necessary to protect your health. But as it relates to our business, we are not going to sugarcoat it. Demand continues to worsen, and the writing is on the wall that travel will not bounce back quickly.\n\n\nWe’d like to give you some color on what we are seeing. Last year on a typical day in March we took in about $22 million from bookings and ancillary fees. Throughout this March, our sales have fallen sharply and in the last several days we have taken in an average of less than $4 million per day while also issuing over $20 million per day of credits to Customers for canceled bookings. This is a stunning shift, which is being driven by fewer new bookings, much lower fares, and a Customer cancel rate more than 10 times the norm. If you do the math, $4 million per day does not come anywhere close to covering our daily expenses. It is hard to predict how long these conditions will last and how much more challenging the environment may become.\n\n\nWe are not alone. Virtually every major carrier is taking actions that were almost unthinkable a few weeks ago, making huge schedule reductions and parking significant portions of their fleets.\n\n\nEven though we entered this from a position of strength with a strong balance sheet and cash in the bank, because of the dramatic fall-off in bookings, we need to reduce our spending immediately so that we can continue to fund JetBlue’s operations and ensure your jobs are protected. We have already announced an initial capacity reduction, pay cuts for our officers (VPs and above), voluntary time off programs, re-negotiated Business Partners agreements, and other spending reductions.\n\n\nWe’ve taken swift and decisive actions to protect you, but we must do more and do so quickly to weather this storm.\n\n\nReducing our flying to reflect demand\nWe are reducing our capacity in the coming months, with a...