A JetBlue Airways airplane lands close to the Air Visitors Management tower on the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Worldwide Airport on Oct. 7, 2025 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Photographs
JetBlue Airways is already the most important airline in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and it needs to get even larger.
“Lauderdale has been a star for us,” JetBlue President Marty St. George stated this month about Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Worldwide Airport.
Capitalizing on progress on the Broward County airport is essential for JetBlue because it revamps its community and rolls out extra high-end choices like a home first-class cabin to return to profitability. Its final worthwhile quarter was two years in the past.
JetBlue was seeking to broaden in Fort Lauderdale even earlier than Spirit Airways, the South Florida-based discounter that was No. 1 on the airport, collapsed on Could 2 underneath the load of debt and years of snowballing issues.
JetBlue is now the highest provider with 36% market share by capability on the airport, based on a Cirium tally of 2026 capability, up from about 24% a 12 months earlier. From Could to June of this 12 months, JetBlue added 5% extra capability, whereas massive rivals pulled again within the Florida offseason, based on Cirium.
The provider has about 106 flights scheduled a day for this 12 months on common, up from about 68 a day final 12 months, Cirium knowledge exhibits.
Simply hours after Spirit’s collapse, JetBlue and different airways laid out their very own journey plans, including flights to fill the void at Fort Lauderdale.
JetBlue raised its income forecast for the 12 months on June 1, citing sturdy demand.
“I am feeling very, very bullish about how prospects have responded to JetBlue’s progress,” St. George stated.
JetBlue says it is planning for much more progress as further gates turn out to be obtainable after Spirit’s demise. A few of these gates are nonetheless tied up in chapter court docket.
JetBlue’s plan is to function about 150 day by day flights at Fort Lauderdale within the peak winter months, which embrace Presidents Day weekend and a few faculty breaks, a schedule that can put it on par with JetBlue’s Boston Logan Worldwide Airport hub, its largest after New York.
The plan contains extra worldwide locations leaving from Fort Lauderdale and a give attention to premium air journey.
St. George stated the provider has been reviewing websites for a lounge — which might be the third in its community — at Fort Lauderdale to cater to these prospects. It already has lounges at New York’s John F. Kennedy Worldwide Airport and in Boston.
“It’s unclear proper now the place we might put a lounge,” he stated. “The airport of us, I feel, are equally motivated to have a lounge down there. Actually, given the dimensions of our operation and the variety of premium prospects going out and in of Fort Lauderdale, I feel [it makes] lots of sense, we simply have to seek out the precise location.”
The massive aggressive risk lies about 26 miles south, at Miami Worldwide Airport, an American Airways hub that dwarfs Fort Lauderdale. Each airports, although Miami is way bigger, are main hubs for leisure prospects in addition to these visiting associates and relations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“There is a good variety of prospects for [whom] Miami is the precise airport, who won’t ever go away Miami, and we’re not planning on changing these prospects,” St. George stated. “I do suppose that as we get extra service in Fort Lauderdale as an even bigger breadth of locations, that utility of Lauderdale Airport will go up.”
American on Friday stated it plans to function a document 100 locations to the Caribbean, Mexico and different airports in Latin America from the U.S., with 77 of them leaving from Miami, together with a brand new flight to Maracaibo, Venezuela, from July 14 and to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, beginning Nov. 1.
JetBlue, for its half, introduced Fort Lauderdale to Caracas service just lately, as carriers construct up flights. American in January introduced it will resume resume service to Venezuela from the US for the primary time since 2019, weeks after the U.S. captured Venezuela’s president.
