Breeze Aviation CEO David Neeleman Talks First International Flights
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Hello and welcome. This is The Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. I speak with people like Elon Musk. I think I've done enough. And Shonda Rhimes. That's so cute. This will be a place where every weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world. So please join me, listen and subscribe to The Michelle Hussein Show from Bloomberg Weekend, wherever you get your podcasts.
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A major milestone reached by Breeze Airways, the low-cost carrier, has become the first U.S. airline in over a decade to be certified by the FAA as a U.S. flag carrier. That designation allows Breeze to make international flights, unlocking new growth for the four-year-old company. Joining us now is David Nielman, a name that you surely know and are familiar with because he was the CEO and the founder of of JetBlue. David, great to have you with us. Thanks so much for joining Open Interest. What is your plan for expansion of this airline now that you've gotten this incredibly rare allowance?
Well, we're up to over 50 airplanes. We're kind of growing every... We get an airplane about every three weeks. We have on firm order about 90 Airbus A220s with an option to go to 120. So it's just doing the same thing that we're doing. We're flying... About 87% of our routes, we have no nonstop competition. So it's a perfect airplane size. We have first class. We have extra legroom seats. And this international expansion is going to be great for us because Saturdays are a little bit of a down day for air travel. But being able to take those airplanes and fly to Cancun and to Punta Cana and to Montego Bay, Jamaica, is going to be a real great asset for us.
Well, David, for anyone who's not familiar with your resume, every airline you've founded has done something to be disruptive, to reshape its home market. Morris with e-ticketing, JetBlue with more comfort for reasonable prices, UL making secondary cities in Brazil, connecting them. For Breeze Airways, what is the disruption here that you're trying to bring into the market?
Well, you know, it's along the same lines of what we've done. I always say never start an airline just for the heck of it. You have to start it with a reason. And when I looked at the U.S.
What milestone has Breeze Airways recently achieved?
market, 125 cities had lost more than 25% of their air service over the last 10 years. So... The big airlines were forcing people to all their hubs. And cities like Charleston, South Carolina, Huntsville, Alabama, vibrant, growing cities, you basically had to get on a plane and fly to a hub. And so we're just taking people and bypassing hubs and going nonstop. But doing it with luxury. We're not really... like a ULCC. We offer first class. We offer extra legroom seats. We offer really low fares. We have kind of a basic economy equivalent. But then we have these bundles that people love to buy up. And, you know, we've got the highest NPS score I've ever seen of any airline I've ever run. So we are voted by Travel Leisure as the third best airline in the country, APEX number one airline.
So it's working. It's this combination of Getting you there for, when we started, I said, let's get you there twice as fast for half the price. That's kind of our goal. And do it with options to fly first class or extra leg room or have free Wi-Fi and a lot of things you don't see on a ULCC.
What are your biggest challenges right now, David? I mean, fuel prices have come down, but I guess planes are harder to get more expensive and labor must be, the cost of labor must be rising as well.
Well, you know, for a while it was the pilot situation, and that's totally been solved. We have 1,200 applications for – we open it up and we have tons of applications. You know, I think staffing at airports, we rely a lot on third-party people. So we're really focused on making sure that they're doing a good job and they're keeping us safe. We're coming up with a program where we're going to put AI cameras on all of our gates to monitor everything that's going on to make sure that the turn is efficient, but also, most importantly, safe, making sure that there's no damage to our aircraft.
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