The Airline Business - JetBlue RPU

Be glad you (likely) work in technology. I spent a few minutes tonight poking around JetBlue's 2008 10-K filing. I was interested in distilling down a revenue-per-user (RPU) number for the airline. I have mentioned JetBlue unwittingly helping a domainer before. And while the new T5 at JFK is a giant step up in overall quality, execution, usability and plain old logic & reason compared to anything else at JFK, I whole-heartedly agree with Patrick Smith's T5 assessment on AskThePilot.

But back to the numbers:

• JetBlue reported $3.39B in 2008 revenue, or ~$9.3M per day.
• JetBlue has 600 flights per day, so that's
• About $15,500 per flight.
• JetBlue flies 107 A320s with ~150 seats and 35 Embraer 190s with ~100 seats.
• Assuming 120 purchased seats per flight:
• JetBlue makes an average of ~$130 per seat purchased,
• Which is about in-line with getting a good deal on an airfare.

$15,000 sounds pretty cheap to fuel up the plane, stock it with service items, get the people on-board, fly them somewhere, land, get all the people off, and pay the salaries of the gate agents and flight-crew - to say nothing of maintenance, depreciation, and capital costs.

Canting Carbon Goodness

Ad Of The Day: Toothless Alcoholic

Another datapoint to support my 'CPMs have really crashed' hypothesis: An ad on the NYT for the Toothless Alcoholic blog:

The Billion Dollar Cat

You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,”

-Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair