Could JetBlue Be Starting An Australian Airline?

JetBlue appears to be hiring an airport supervisor for… Brisbane, Australia?

I can’t speak to the genuineness of the ad, but there are a couple of LinkedIn profiles that appear to identify people in administrative roles already working for JetBlue in Brisbane.

This is the HR manager and the person doing ‘process work’.

Let’s be clear, I do not expect to see JetBlue flying to Brisbane, Australia. They don’t have aircraft with the range to fly from the U.S. to Australia. They’re only just about to begin hopping across The Pond from the Northeast to London. Greater Europe expansion would be in their future before transpacific long haul flying.


New JetBlue Business Class, Credit: JetBlue

JetBlue partners with American, Hawaiian, Emirates and Qatar all of which fly to Australia. However these aren’t partnerships currently set up to offer significant connectivity to JetBlue out of Australia. Before the pandemic Dallas – Brisbane appeared like it might be in the cards for American Airlines. However codesharing is limited to flights in and out of Boston and New York.

If someone were to get into truly fanciful levels of speculation they might point out that Australia does not place any limits on foreign ownership of airlines flying entirely domestic routes in the country. It would be fun to imagine JetBlue Australia!

However since Betteridge’s law of headlines says that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no,” the more likely explanation is an error in the job posting and current JetBlue employees who used to live in Brisbane but haven’t updated their location.

(HT: Jonathan W.)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Could it be Brisbane California which is very close to SFO? Maybe somebody clicked on the wrong Brisbane.

  2. No. But it sure is a promising place for David Neeleman to head, once he gets Breeze straightened out.

  3. So, possibly stupid thought, but – is there any chance that these folks were trying to put their location as Queens, NY (home of JFK) and an auto-populate or drop-down list completed it to QL? I’ve seen job postings which were clearly in Seattle, WA ended up posted in Washington, D.C. (and vice versa), so wondering if maybe some element of the LinkedIn auto-populate functionality led them astray.

  4. Their partner airlines would almost certainly ally with Qantas for flights within Australia. And now that Virgin has more or less recovered in Australia, we’re back to the two-airline duopoly in Australia which has never ever successfully expanded to three.

    But an intriguing mystery, for sure.

  5. This job is better than being a beer taster or sofa tester! I can’t have anyone fly anywhere because of all the lockdowns, so I get to sit around on my duff all day!

  6. Rubbish click-bait. Jet Blue’s career site of course mentions nothing about any such job.

Comments are closed.