Newly Announced “Breeze” Airline by Founder of JetBlue Could Be Coming to Providence
GoLocalProv Business Team
Newly Announced “Breeze” Airline by Founder of JetBlue Could Be Coming to Providence
On Friday, JetBlue founder David Neeleman announced the formal launch of his new airline called Breeze Airways.
Initially, when the airline was first announced, the working name of the carrier was Moxy and the investor presentations cited Providence as one of its potential leading target markets.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“We have met with them and we believe Breeze presents an excellent opportunity for Rhode Islanders. We have both terminal and airfield capacity that they will need, including an updated and fully staffed International Arrival Facility. We look forward to continuing our dialogue with their excellent team,” Iftikhar Ahmad, CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, told GoLocal on Saturday.
The Rhode Island Airport Corporation oversees T.F. Green Airport -- which was just voted the best Small Airport in the Northeast according to U.S. Today.
In June 2019, GoLocal reported of then-Moxy:
De facto, Providence would be the hub, “Moxy seems keen on secondary airports in the country’s biggest metro areas like Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Providence, outside Boston, features prominently as an example in Moxy’s presentation.”
According to the reports, “On a map of prospective routes, it shows Providence flights to Allegiant-like airports in Florida (i.e., Orlando Sanford and St. Petersburg) and California (i.e., Oakland, San Jose, Contra Costa, Orange County, Burbank, Ontario and McClellan-Palomar, north of San Diego). Other dots from Providence include Phoenix Mesa, Rocky Mountain Airport near Denver, Concord near Charlotte, Fort Worth’s Meacham Airport and Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland. Aside from Providence, other northeast region airports of interest to Moxy include Baltimore, Trenton, Stewart (halfway between New York City and Albany) and Republic Airport in eastern Long Island."
"Asked if Breeze was likely to launch with a nationwide set of destinations or go with a more regional approach, Neeleman said 'probably more regionally. We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin,'" reports the website The Points Guy -- a leading travel website.
"Neeleman believes there are hundreds of markets ripe for Breeze’s nonstop service. He pointed to the series of airline mergers in the U.S. during the past two decades, saying that the bigger carriers that have emerged have increasingly focused on building up their major hub airports," according to The Points Guy. "That’s left travelers – especially leisure customers – with fewer options for nonstop flights between smaller and mid-sized markets."
“I’m always skeptical about startups, but Neeleman does have an amazing record and is coming into this with an enormous amount of capital,” said Jay Shabat, senior analyst at Skift Airline Weekly. “This thing is not going to run out of money fast. In that sense, he will have staying power.”
“There hasn’t been a successful startup airline in the United States since JetBlue,” Shabat said. “And that was at a time when the legacy carriers were a bloated mess. It was easy. Neeleman came up with this idea of, ‘Why don’t we go into JFK, no one is paying attention?’ These big guys just had costs that were so much higher. But it wouldn’t be that way now. The Deltas and the Americans of the world are tough competitors. They are pretty lean.”
The initial Breeze website is targeting new employees, "We've started to assemble our team to help launch a new, technologically-advanced company, thoughtfully designed to take fliers from the places they live to the places they want to go -- as simply and economically as possible.
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