JetBlue's Mea Culpa Falls Short

Rachel Wimberly -- Tradeshow Week, 3/5/2007

Valentine's Day was anything but happy for hundreds of passengers stranded on JetBlue planes for close to eight hours during a winter storm in New York.

A lot of the passengers' horror stories involved being on the way to tropical vacations or uniting with sweethearts. Not to diminish anyone's bad experience, but imagine you'd just spent days on end of long hours working a tradeshow and then were held against your will on a plane before you could get back home. How might you fare? I, for one, would have a tough time.

JetBlue has sailed through blue skies since it took off seven years ago, and, as they say, it was just a matter of time before something happened to knock the high-flyer off its perch. It was just too good to be true.

Even so, the meltdown that occurred on Valentine's Day — and continued well through the busy President's Day holiday as more than 1,000 flights were canceled — was a public relations disaster.

So, JetBlue did what seems to be all the rage these days: It admitted its mistakes and apologized. JetBlue CEO and founder David Neelman said he was embarrassed and humiliated by the experience, but didn't intend to step down from his post.

Instead, after admitting the airline would most likely see losses of at least $30 million because of the fiasco, damage control kicked into high gear to try and woo back customers who may have vowed to never set foot on another JetBlue flight.

With Congress suddenly demanding a customer bill of rights for passengers (even though an incident with similar consequences occurred in 1999 at Northwest Airlines), JetBlue beat lawmakers to the punch and introduced one of its own. Here are some highlights:

• Any customer whose flight is canceled by JetBlue will have the choice of a full refund or re-accommodation on a JetBlue flight at no additional charge.
• A customer whose flight is delayed prior to scheduled departure for four to six hours due to a "controllable irregularity" is entitled to a voucher good for travel on JetBlue equal to the amount paid by the customer for a one-way trip.
• A customer who is involuntarily denied boarding will receive $1,000.
• And lastly, if a customer experiences a ground delay of more than five hours, JetBlue will take the necessary action to see that the customer can deplane.

There are many more points under the JetBlue Airways Customer Bill of Rights, as it's called, but I was particularly peeved by two.

The very murky "controllable irregularity" bothers me. Basically, the airline says it's not responsible for whatever it deems is out of its control. Isn't that how this whole mess started in the first place? Weather was a factor, but Mother Nature didn't make people sit on those planes for hour upon hour.

Secondly, if I'm ever stuck on a plane on the ground for five hours because JetBlue decided that is an acceptable amount of time, I promise you: I won't be grinning and bearing it.