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Issue link: http://airportbusiness.epubxp.com/i/813534
INDUSTRY INSIDER April 2017 airportbusiness 39 bite off too many of those challenging markets all at once. So we paced them out with cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Cleveland. In 2016, we did LaGuardia Airport, which was high on our corporate list. It's been fan- tastic. It did exactly what we've thought it would do. When we entered the market, the walk-up fare was $443. The walk-up fare right now is $129. With LaGuardia's strong busi- ness mix, we can be profitable with that fare. AB: JETBLUE'S NUMBERS ON STRUC- T U R E D SAV I NGS W IL L BE FROM $55 MILLION TO $65 MILLION FROM AIRPORTS. HOW WILL THE AIRLINE ACHIEVE THAT? MS: The best way to achieve that is through a process of building efficiencies. Take the new lobby at JFK Airport as an example. It's gone to all self-bag tagging. On a peak day you could stand in a 30-minute line to get a tag onto your bag. Now every kiosk can handle it. It's so much faster to get through the lobby and it also require a lot fewer crew members. Right now we have that in JFK, Fort Lauderdale and San Juan. It's going to be moving across the rest of the system as well. AB: WHAT'S GOING ON WITH YOUR CARIBBEAN FLYING, ESPECIALLY OUT OF SAN JUAN? MS: It was big news in 2016 and will be in 2017. We've opened a lot of cities in the Caribbean and we started flights to Cuba. Cuba is unique in that we can't follow a playbook like we do in other cities. Cuba, in the long term, has incred- ible business potential for JetBlue, similar to how the Dominican Republic has exploded in the last 20 years. We have almost every Caribbean island that we're going to be flying to already covered. Now the focus is adding new destinations from the best stations that we're already in. For exam- ple, we've been in Aruba for probably 10 years, but we just started service to there from Fort Lauderdale in 2016. We connected the dots. A B : A I R P O RT-W I S E , W H AT A R E JETBLUE'S PRIORITIES IN 2017? MS: We've already talked about growth, but we're also looking at maintaining our partner- ships and making sure that service levels in our airports are the way we want them so that passengers are having a good experience before they get in the air. At Fort Lauderdale, there's been a lot of money spent to fix up Terminals 3 and 4. We've talked about taking Fort Lauderdale up to 140 flights a day and beyond, and we're going to need to do that with some help from the county. They are building a new international wing in Terminal 1 and I think we have the right to use a couple of those gates for our international operations. www.aviationpros.com/12322408 www.aviationpros.com/10017751 JetBlue Airways