This continues a new category of posts focused on Innovative Uses of Technology for Business Benefit. As I wrote in The Giant Crunching Sound, CIOs are crunching incumbent, utility technology spend and freeing up dollars for innovations.
Innovation is what JetBlue oozes - since its birth just over 4 years ago People make the point that if you are a start up, you have little legacy, utility spend to worry about - most of your budget can go towards innovation. But the US airline industry around it was not innovating much. If you go on a flight on a wide body plane, most airlines these days show navigational maps on movie screens. I first saw this US technology on a Swissair flight in 1989. I did not see one on a US airline till 4 years later. The airline industry in the US has been in a funk and just trying to survive, not innovate. Even Southwest, an airline I admire, was till recently a technology Luddite. They reluctantly gave up their returnable, plastic boarding passes after post- 9/11 security requirements forced them to. So, with this backdrop it is remarkable the technology innovation JetBlue has taken advantage of.
To start with, over 70% of their reservations are on the web. It built its pricing, customer feedback, electronic ticketing concepts around a clean, simple Web experience. For phone reservations, work-at-home operators in a "virtual" contact center use voice over IP (VoIP) lines. They drove a paperless cockpit. Pilots use laptops to get FAA updates on-line and make pre-flight load and balance calculations. This 2002 CIO article catalogs a whole bunch of other small, but high payback, innovations. The company has evolved to try much more sophisticated technology - see this use of free space optics to help relocate corporate headquarters without too much disruption.
Passengers of course are delighted with some of the technology innovations Jetblue has delivered to them. The most popular is the DirectTV channels on each seat. No, they did not wait for Singapore Air to first roll that out. JetBlue was the first airline in the world to offer live TV and, to maintain this advantage as long as possible, actually bought the company that supplied it with the technology. Then, there is the free WI-FI at their New York JFK terminal.
If you think all this technology innovation is expensive, think again. JetBlue says it spends relative to its revenues less than half the average in the airline industry. Now, that's cool.
