Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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.


2 comments:

Dave Naffziger said...

Funny, I just read this now (I'm way behind on my feeds). Nice post though.

Colleen said...

This is a fascinating post! You're like a combo of sleuth and mathematician, like the characters on MathNet (remember that show?)

It's hard for me to imagine what it was like to be a reporter prior to when SEC filings became available online. Glad to see non-journalists are also exercising their rights to dig through 10-Ks and the like. It's kinda fun, right?