MassPort: JetBlue Off to Good Start

PHOTO/MICHAEL NOVINSON Massachusetts Port Authority CEO Thomas Glynn discussed JetBlue's performance in its first month at Worcester Airport during a Worcester Regional Research Bureau forum Tuesday.

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Customers are filling Worcester’s JetBlue flights and leaving happy despite higher fares and diverted planes, the CEO of the Massachusetts Port Authority said Wednesday morning.

“The investment in Worcester (Regional) Airport is going to pay dividends over time,” Thomas Glynn told a crowd of roughly 75 at a Worcester Regional Research Bureau forum.

JetBlue’s four daily flights going to and from Worcester have usually been at least 80 percent full since service began Nov. 7, Glynn said, which is better than where the low-cost airline was expecting.

The once-a-day flights to Fort Lauderdale and Orlando also received two of the three highest customer satisfaction marks in November for any routes in JetBlue’s network, Glynn said.

“The fact that people are having a very positive experience bodes well,” he said.

Yet Mother Nature continues to pose challenges. Since service began, four of JetBlue’s 120 flights have had to be diverted from Worcester to Boston due to weather, Glynn said.

JetBlue then had to shuttle arriving passengers to Worcester or allow departing passengers to reschedule their inbound flights to Boston, MassPort spokesman Matthew Brelis said.

“JetBlue knew about this when they made the commitment to Worcester,” Glynn said. “In New England, we have the weather we have.”

MassPort hopes to partially mitigate the fog-induced diversions by installing a $32 million, state-of-the-art landing system in the next few years, Glynn said.

Glynn also acknowledged that tickets on JetBlue flights out of Worcester cost, on average, $50 to $60 more than the same flights out of Boston.

He said the airline is forced to offer lower Florida fares from major cities like Boston since JetBlue has so many more seats to fill. JetBlue can carry 4,700 Boston passengers and 200 Worcester passengers to Florida each day.

“The pricing is predicated on their goal of filling up the plane, not having everyone pay the same amount,” Glynn said.

He’s encouraging customers to focus not just on the cost of flights but instead on the total cost of the flying experience. Long-term parking is roughly $20-per-day cheaper at Worcester than at Logan International Airport, Glynn said, plus Central Massachusetts customers can save on gas mileage.

Another difficulty associated with growing Worcester’s airport is the lack of highway access, Glynn said. He said JetBlue understood the challenges associated with getting to the airport and never made roadway infrastructure improvements a condition for further growth.

“There aren’t really a lot of pathways that aren’t going to be hard to pull off,” he said. “We’re going to need to be respectful of residential neighborhoods.”

A study commissioned by MassPort and released Tuesday said the Airport should service some 100,000 passengers in 2014 with the JetBlue flights roughly 72.5 full.

By 2023, Frasca & Associates – which conducted the service for MassPort -- projected that seven daily departures from Worcester would serve some 500,000 passengers each year.

The airport is expected to generate 201 direct jobs and $196 million of direct spending over the next decade, the study found.

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