JetBlue’s CEO admits that the airline hasn’t felt like it’s winning – and that’s caused morale issues across the company. Flight attendants are demoralized, pilots are demoralized, and so are corporate employees: “We’re in a very challenging situation.” These comments were first reported by aviation watchdog JonNYC:
..[The morale issue] it's not just limited to Inflight, it's also at corporate where people are like 'another year of no profitability and then there will be a 7th to be clear' and probably an 8th. So we're in a very challenging situation."
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) May 29, 2025
Major morale issues at the airline date back a couple of years to before Joanna Geraghty’s tenure as CEO.
Employees saw her predecessor as making a series of strategic blunders, like the attempted acquisition of Spirit Airlines which would have supported growth enabled by the airline’s ill-fated partnership with American Airlines – yet he abandoned fighting for the American partnership in favor of a Spirit deal, where they ere overpaying for a troubled airline and investing resources in a deal that was ultimately killed on antitrust grounds (unbeknownst to them, a blessing in disguise not to pick up the recently-bankrupt carrier).
JetBlue has gone through downsizing of pilot workforce, cities served, and flights. They’ve scaled back on some product elements and led the industry raising bag charges. They are no longer chasing business travelers and attempting to downsize to profits, a notoriously difficult thing to do in an airline industry that rewards scale to amortize fixed costs and meet varied customer needs.
Their new strategic play is linking up with United Airlines in a way that brings that carrier back into New York JFK (as competition!) presumably in hopes of tighter collaboration, future Star Alliance membership, and potentially even acquisition. Will JetBlue sell itself to United?
Employees need more than a paycheck to motivate them. While pay is baseline, people need to respect their colleagues and feel they are on a mission greater than themselves. In other words, work needs to be pleasant and engaging and purposeful. If they feel their ability to be on a winning team is limited, that will have downstream effects on performance. And JetBlue hasn’t been a winning team in nearly 20 years.
Employees had the sense of a sinking ship after years of mismanagement and the discontent spilled out into the open a couple of years ago. Now, their CEO says the morale issues haven’t been turned around. She says employees need to get on board with the program, but in truth the program needs to be a strategic success to begin getting employees on board.
ZERO sympathy from me, someone who used to work for B6
What a nasty degrading company.
Buh
Bye!
Come now. Can’t be that bad. Partnership with United. Cheer up!
(For real, Mint is awesome. Keep that going. Please.)
B6 was a great marketing idea that has been poorly executed for its entire 25 year life.
They probably now have the best management team they have ever had but they are in a hole that is pretty deep to dig out of.
There really is very little that will come out of the UA partnership that will move the needle other than that UA will sell seats on B6 all for the privilege of returning to JFK in at best a single market where they will not have an advantage.
B6 has made alot of strategic mistakes but they played this deal perfectly. B6 dangled just enough access to JFK to satisfy UA’s “need” to get back to JFK w/ the larger impact of getting B6 into a larger loyalty program.
B6 needed some backing to turn itself around and this is what was needed.
Take a breath and check your work, Gary. Grammarly is not expensive…
Karma. Years ago many of these people working at JBLU predicted the demise of one or several legacy carriers. So here they are now dancing with whoever will throw them a line. So to all those JBLU people that were hoping for a failure to benefit them, I say “How bout them apples?”
@tim
So great to have someone who is an expert on everything and insists on sharing his insights on every post.
There’s little doubt in my mind that Jet Blue will be literally sucked up by United within a period of months…and for pennies on the dollar. If there is to be any workforce consolidation the seniority lists will be put together with a stapler.
UA. Just buy B6 and get this over with. Your chance of getting them is the best you’ll have.
They said a few months ago no partnership was happening. And that they aren’t interested in buying B6. I’m sure they are ironing out the purchase agreement now.
B6 marketing strategy was flawed from the beginning. Niche markets are for LCCs and they struggle with that as their employees are poached away by bigger paychecks at legacy carriers. Mergers and chapter 6 filings are coming.to an airline near you!
@Tom @Johnny — Get a room, fellas! Bah!
Said it before, I trust the flight crews and Pilot to complete every plane and each flight.
I don’t trust those in the Head office to fly the airline.
Have been a big fan of B6 for it’s entire existence. A TrueBlue traveller north, south, east, and west. Unprofitable for the last 6 years is trouble on the horizon. Cutting routes and costs may slow the losses but cutting away from business traveler will doom them. The concentration of routes thru the northeast hubs (JFK & BOS) cost them on-time performence which is killing them. I watch FlightAware and 5 and 6 hour delays almost daily are not acceptable. I’m not happy to see them go out of existence.
Mint is shint. Noo Yawk deserves a gigantic knock in the ego when they lose their hometown airline to, of all corporate people, Chicago’s Hometown Airline. Who’s the Second City now?
I took the buyout offered after the Spirit deal collapsed. IMO, Robin tried to make B6 too big too fast. Was only focused on new international routes when domestic travelers were complaining by the thousands.
In-house- Tech Ops doesn’t communicate with Operations so aircraft swaps happen too late. For over 10 years could never get a straight answer of why the disconnect between Tech Ops and Operations. Couldn’t fix that so I don’t have much faith moving forward. B6’s Twitter page are complaints that are fixable but aren’t.
It’s a sh!t show from top to bottom. The F.A.’s get absolutely no support or understanding from management ZERO! Every management action is a disciplinary action towards the F.A.’s. While the senior flight attendants can manipulate their schedules the new hires are at the mercy of all things holy!
Management takes out their anger on line staff over their hatred and disapproval of membership voting in favor of working under a contract. As a result management takes the hardest line possible when it comes to employee missteps. For example management will give late charges to employees arriving late to the gate knowing that the aircraft is arriving 60 minutes after the employee! Additionally that employee receives a late charge, but is NOT paid until the aircraft lands, deplanes, cleans, services, boards new passengers and closes the boarding door. If my salary was comparable to Joanna (total compensation is $6.76 million) my morale would have been outstanding!
@ O’Hare Is My Second Home –
Anyone buying a ticket to or from the NYC market is going to get hosed big time when United takes over. The duopoly with Delta will send prices through the roof.
As a recent first time B6 passenger I was pretty unimpressed just about everything. I paid through the nose for our tickets, there were numerous delays, I was unnecessarily moved to a later flight – nice surprise when you’re at the gate -, even though I paid the very highest price for an economy seat I still got soaked for baggage fees, and our bags were sent on a separate flight. In sum my experience was just awful. Hopefully the new CEO will improve things but it’s going to be some time before I choose to spend my money with them again.
Would like more details on exactly why morale is low and the company is unprofitable. How about a little insight here as that is what the article is about? Also, jetBlue, please stop making nearly everything cashless in your JFK terminal.
What do you call someone who copies their blog text into Word and hits F7 to run spell and grammar check?
Tim is a damn idiot.
Dude thinks he has to tell everyone why he is right and everyone else is wrong. B6 has flaws, sure. But it also has a cult like following.
It’s exactly why DL can’t crack BOS and JFK. B6 offers a better or on par experience at a better price point.
DL is just a copy cat of everything B6 innovated.
I have been happy with JetBlue for years. I hope that they continue.
avgeek3900,
DL indeed did copy B6′ seatback AVOD and WiFi- which UA is now copying but DL has executed both strategies on a much larger scale.
and DL is larger than B6 in both BOS and JFK as well as MCO and TPA and is 2/3 their size even in FLL
I remember well DL’s low cost carrier within a carrier strategies and they both very successfully have allowed to DL to grow to be the largest domestic carrier in the US on its own metal.
DL aggressively grew JFK faster than B6 when JFK slot controls were removed post 9/11 and at BOS during and after covid while B6 was trying a million strategies, nearly all of which failed, and in the process failed to defend its core markets.
I get the fanboyism we all have but much of your post is easily countered by actual facts.
JetBlue’s fundamental problem is that it’s not a viable business. I remember Gordon Bethune saying this when they launched and he wasn’t wrong. Their best shot was that partnership with AA. Now that it’s gone, I’m not sure they have a shot. I guess UA would be willing to buy their assets, but that’s problematic from an antitrust standpoint. In the meantime, we’ll have to see if they can keep muddling along