JetBlue has secured slots for up to three daily roundtrips to London, spread across Gatwick And Stansted. JetBlue has targeted London as its first European destination.
JetBlue has secured 14 weekly slots at Gatwick. Similarly, JetBlue also secured all 28 weekly slots it had requested at London Stansted Airport.
However, JetBlue has not received any slots at London Heathrow for summer 2021. JetBlue had requested 42 weekly slots at London-Heathrow.
JetBlue is planning to fly once daily from Gatwick to New York-JFK, and twice daily from Stansted to Boston. All flights will be operated onboard an Airbus A321LR with only 138 seats.
Regarding this, JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes stated:
“To your point about Heathrow, we are very confident we have a path to more than one London airport… more to follow on that.
“It’s going to take some time for everyone to get vaccinated, of course, it’s going to take some time for everyone to feel comfortable flying again. But I think you’ll see there’s such an inbuilt desire to travel, there is so much pent-up demand. When we do our customer research, of course, there’s reluctance from some to fly right now, but very few people say that they will never want to fly again.
“We actually think by the time we get to next summer, it’ll be nearly 18 months for some people since they had a vacation, or seen friends and family. So we actually think next summer will be relatively strong. And we, therefore, we think our time to serve London is actually brilliantly timed.”