JetBlue just announced BlueFirst. It's their new domestic first class product. The launch date is December 8. You can book it on more than 30 routes starting now.
This is the same airline that spent two decades telling you first class was wasteful capitalism and that everyone should sit in slightly-better-than-Spirit seats while eating free snacks. The brand was built on not having first class. That was the entire pitch. Now they're selling first class because apparently principles don't survive contact with a balance sheet.
The real innovation here is charging people extra money to sit in a bigger seat on a plane. Groundbreaking stuff. Someone at JetBlue headquarters looked at Delta and United and thought "what if we did that, but later and with a name that sounds like a menthol cigarette."
BlueFirst. They workshopped that. Multiple people sat in a conference room and agreed this was the winner. Not Premium Blue. Not Mint Domestic. BlueFirst. Like a preschool or a venereal disease awareness campaign.
Retail traders are already pricing in the revenue uplift. They're calculating margins on legroom. They're building spreadsheets that assume every flight will be 100% first class bookings at peak prices because that's how airlines work in their minds. They think this changes the competitive landscape. They think JetBlue just found a moat.
The stock will do whatever it was going to do anyway. Oil prices matter. Pilot contracts matter. Whether Gate B7 has functional air conditioning matters more than BlueFirst. But sure, let's pretend selling expensive seats on short flights is the catalyst everyone's been waiting for.
December 8 can't come fast enough so we can all watch someone pay $300 extra to fly first class from Boston to Fort Lauderdale for 47 minutes of complementary snack mix.
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