JetBlue slashes iconic business route in latest network shakeup

JetBlue Airways will exit one of the nation's most iconic business routes.

The New York-based carrier filed plans this week to stop flying between New York's LaGuardia Airport (LGA) and Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) in late April, as first flagged by Ishrion Aviation and later confirmed by an airline spokesperson.

JetBlue currently operates this 184-mile shuttle route six times daily, making it one of the routes with the highest number of daily frequencies in the airline's network.

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The flight, operated by the soon-to-be-retired Embraer E190, has been flown since October 2016.

In a statement confirming the move, JetBlue spokesperson Derek Dombrowski shared that "As part of our JetForward strategy to build the best East Coast leisure network, JetBlue will discontinue service between Boston Logan (BOS) and New York LaGuardia (LGA). The airport fees charged to JetBlue at LGA have risen sharply — now about $50 per traveler — which make it impossible for us to offer the low fares customers expect while maintaining profitability on this route."

Exiting this market delivers yet another blow to JetBlue's once-ambitious network strategy. It follows a few months of back-to-back cuts that saw the airline drop more than 50 routes and 15 cities.

To return to profitability, JetBlue has enacted its so-called JetForward plan, which includes, among many other elements, a redrawn route map that exclusively focuses on where JetBlue has historically been strongest: leisure markets in the Northeast and Florida.

JetBlue has cut most of its intra-West Coast flying, some of its nascent transatlantic portfolio and much of its nonleisure-focused flying from New York.

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In fact, at its peak in March 2023, JetBlue operated a whopping 52 daily departures from LaGuardia, according to Cirium schedules. After the Boston cut, that number drops to just 13 peak daily departures going forward, the airline told TPG.

Without Boston, JetBlue will exclusively fly on a year-round basis from LGA to Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa and West Palm Beach, Florida; and from LGA to Nantucket in the peak summer season.

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Interestingly, LaGuardia is one of the nation's most capacity-constrained airports, and operating there requires slots, or takeoff and landing permissions, for each flight.

Airlines can't just pick up these slots on an ad-hoc free-market basis, and selling one of these prized assets is almost never a good idea (just ask United how it feels today having sold its slots at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Delta back in 2015). Instead, airlines like to lease their valuable slots to other airlines.

In JetBlue's case, the Boston cut frees up six slots. JetBlue will redeploy "three takeoff and landing slots to leisure markets while leasing the remaining three to another carrier," the airline said in a statement.

If you're wondering about the identity of that other airline, all signs point to it being Porter, the fast-growing Canadian carrier that just announced late last month that it'll add three daily flights to LaGuardia. (JetBlue and Porter already have an existing business relationship as interline partners.)

Without JetBlue in the market, the New York-to-Boston route will be operated by American and Delta. JetBlue will continue serving Boston from its other New York City base at JFK.

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