LAST WEEK’S FIASCO at JetBlue left its customers enraged and its CEO “mortified.” But beyond the outrage of passengers who sat nine hours on the tarmac and went nowhere while their baggage took off for parts unknown, there are lessons for other enterprises, not the least of which, hedge funds.
While nearly a quarter of the low-cost carrier’s flights were canceled over the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend, I’m writing this at 30,000 feet on a JetBlue flight that took off Monday morning from JFK airport, on time and uneventfully. The chaos in the terminal was gone and, except for the presence of a TV news truck, one would never know that this was the scene of a full-scale meltdown just a few days earlier.
David G. Neeleman , the founder and chief executive of JetBlue (ticker: JBLU), admitted in an interview with the New York Times the low-cost carrier’s systems were inadequate to cope with the perfect storm of conditions that led to the widely reported breakdown in its operations. An ice storm just before a heavy vacation time for President’s week combined with management mistakes to expose the shortcomings of JetBlue’s information infrastructures.
