Joanne Geraghty CEO of Jetblue defended her airline’s cooperation with United Airlines at the IATA Congress in Delhi.
The agreement, announced last week after talks on a previous agreement with American collapsed, spans interline agreements and a frequent flyer partnership.
Questioned that this was “consolidation without consolidating” she reiterated that United will gain slots at JFK while JetBlue manages United’s ancillary fees on its platform.
JetBlue represents approximately 6pc of domestic seats in the US, facing obstacles in competing against larger carriers.
Ms Geraghty explained the goal is connecting networks, bringing JetBlue operations to 91 Indian cities and enhancing travel options to Europe.
Ms Geraghty shared: “I think it’s basically a synonym for cooperation. It is not a co-chair. It’s a collaboration with United Airlines that touches on four areas. An interline, a frequent flyer partnership. United will receive some slots at JFK. And then we are going to be moving United’s ancillary fees onto a platform that JetBlue has. So we’ll be running their ancillary platform.
We’ve spent a lot of time with the Department of Justice over the last five years. And we’re playing it safe, right?
JetBlue represents about 6pc of the domestic seats in the United States. And we operate in a world where there are four large carriers. And so as a smaller airline, it’s difficult to compete on scale with those big carriers. So a small guy trying to combine with another small guy to be a medium guy or girl was unable to actually accomplish that. So extremely frustrating because the DOJ allowed all the other transactions to go through and then decides under the Biden administration to block these.
, we’re a simple airline. Just simple. We do what we say. It’s a codeshare. We’re gonna codeshare to 30 points in Europe and we’re gonna co-chair across the Atlantic. Simple codeshare.
what we’re doing actually is connecting the networks and we operate in India to 91 cities in the nation itself. There’s a lot of opportunities connecting over India. And by us now connecting India directly to Europe with our flights and they’re connected to these networks, it’s just expanding the travel options for our customers.”
