JetBlue Airways will reduce or eliminate at least half a dozen flight routes at Long Beach Airport as the airline continues to redistribute its resources across the country, the company announced Thursday.
JetBlue said as of April 29 it would stop all service to and from Oakland International Airport from all destinations. Oakland was one of the short-haul destinations that travelers could fly to and from Long Beach.
JetBlue currently has 24 of the airport’s 41 permanent flight slots, but that could change as the company reduces flights from Long Beach to Oakland and possibly other destinations. An airport spokesperson said JetBlue had yet to present the airport with a firm number of flight slots that it intends to vacate.
Oakland, which is also serviced by Southwest Airlines from Long Beach, was one of the top destinations traveled to and from Long Beach.
Long Beach Airport Director Cynthia Guidry said in a statement that JetBlue continues to be a valuable partner at the airport and that decisions like the one announced by JetBlue Thursday are part of an evolving aviation industry that will impact airports along the West Coast.
“We are confident that relinquished flight slots will be utilized by other air carriers, in accordance with our established waiting list,” Guidry said. “Demand at the Long Beach Airport is growing and remains high for the convenience and first-class travel experience.”
Filling the slots once the number of vacancies is finalized involves a waiting list that ranks airlines by priority. That list currently has Southwest Airlines as the top ranked airline with Hawaiian Airlines and Delta Airlines filling out the rankings.
JetBlue has no more supplemental flights slots at Long Beach, which have been granted to airlines in the past when the airport’s noise budget analysis has found that there was room to operate more flights. The times that flights are flown and decreasing aircraft noise have contributed to these slots being offered.
Each airline would have the opportunity to claim available slots in individual rounds where airlines can pass on slots or claim them. In the past Southwest, Delta and even Hawaiian, a partner airline of JetBlue, have used the process to add flights slots to their holdings.
Long Beach had been a hub for JetBlue, but the airline has slowly begun to reduce its presence at the airport in recent years. In April 2018 it announced it was revising its West Coast strategy, which included dropping its daily flight load from 35 flights per day to 23 flights per day in Long Beach.
A year later it announced it was relinquishing 10 more of its flight slots at the airport, bringing its share down to 24 permanent flight slots. The moves allowed for Southwest and others to increase their foothold in Long Beach where JetBlue had been the largest tenant since its arrival in 2002.
The decision to cut back flights at Long Beach came in part because of a new policy adopted by the City Council that increased the usage requirements for daily flight slots that pushed airlines to fly more frequently or risk being stripped of the slots.
JetBlue called that policy “discriminatory”, but it had been underutilizing flight slots according to city officials, some of whom tied that trend to a January 2017 vote by the City Council to table discussions of allowing international flights to operate at Long Beach Airport.
The request had been made by JetBlue in 2015 leading to years of tumultuous public meetings where residents pushed to block the airport from becoming an international hub for JetBlue.