I am on board the Breeze A220 and next to me is David Neeleman!
David Neeleman is best known as the founder of JetBlue and Azul in Brazil; Breeze is his
fifth airline.
One year after Breeze began service in primarily in the east and southeast United States using
Embarer 190 and 195s, the airline officially inaugurated its trans-continental service
on June 8th, 2022 on a flight from Richmond, Virginia to San Francisco, California using
brand new Airbus A220-300s (formerly known as the Bombardier CS300).
On board the flight, Neeleman told me how Breeze is different from other airlines.
We fly between points that people don’t fly.
Our 87 routes that have been announced, I think there only three or four that we don’t
have any non-stop competition.
We also just try to be seriously nice to our customers, get you there twice as nice with
half the price.
The A220 will become the backbone of the Breeze fleet, with 80 aircraft on order plus options
for 40 more.
Also new to Breeze, a competitive priced first class product called “nicest”, found only
on the A220 fleet.
This is an unique airplane.
It’s got bigger windows, it’s lighter, it’s bigger, bathrooms are bigger, from
a customer perspective it’s a really nice airplane.
And because it has a 2 and 3 configuration in coach, you can actually experimenting with
having more First Class seats.
So this particular plane has 36 first class seats with all kinds of cool features to hold
your iPad and hold your phone, either on the tray table or the tray in front of you and
we are going to see how it works.
We have other configuration that have 12 first class seats (and) we can swap them out in
a matter of days.
We can get about 50% more for our already low fares for these seats up here, it’s
better than two or three times on the other guys…it’s comfortable in the back, but
this is really, as we say, are our nicest seats.
Neeleman goes on and talked about the target market and the pricing strategy for ‘nicest’
product.
I think it’s just anyone who likes to fly in comfort.
There is not a lot of business traveller on this customer (base), it’s leisure luxury
and those are the kind of people that we want to attract.
These folks ahead of you here are on their 20th anniversary and so of course he wasn’t
going not take his wife on the nicest seats.
Cost him a couple hundred bucks, but it was certainly worth it.
We are experimenting with prices… obviously we are trying to fill the front.
I think the more people that fly up here want to come back and fly on us again so maybe
it’s $50 next time or $100 once they had the experience they don’t want to do without
it.
Overall, it’s got average 50% more to be able to justify losing the seats from both
on a row basis and also taking take rows out because of the extra legroom.
The longer the flight, the more people are willing to upgrade to pay more.
If it’s a shorter flight then they’re more content in the back.
The longer these flights go, then the more we have more the first class seats.
Looking to the future, Neeleman is careful not to divulge where the airline may fly next.
I think if you just look at the market and say there’s a DOT database that shows how
many people go between cities and if one stands out that has a lot of people and there’s
not a lot of nonstop service then certainly be a target for us.
And what about Hawaii?
Yeah, the plane can certainly do it.
There’s a lot of smaller secondary cities in California, Utah, Oregon, Washington, even
into Arizona, Montana that the plane can reach that make a lot of sense.
And there’s seasonality, southern tier areas like to go in the summer and then the northern
folks like to go in the winter…can really adjust and is a comfortable way to go to Hawaii.
Breeze encountered difficulties putting the A220 in service in May.
The real inaugural flight two weeks prior almost did not take place, because certification
was not received until the night before.
In fact, Breeze had to charter another airline, Global X, to cover some of its flights while
more A220s came on line.
The FAA has a process they go through and we submitted the manuals eight months in advance
and the process just didn’t go as quickly as we had hoped from their side.
We were supposed to be up flying three weeks before the time just slipped and slipped.
Now we are little bit…training…we got plenty of pilots we got plenty of airplanes,
we have over 100 A220 pilots on staff.
We getting our sixth airplane and we are flying two (aircraft) empty all day long trying to
build times.
And one last question, the slot Breeze just got in Long Beach - where are you going?
We have a few months to decide, we will figure that out.
Thank you!
After arrival in San Francisco, Airport Director Ivar Satero joined Neeleman for a cake and
ribbon cutting, formally welcoming Breeze to SFO.