JetBlue adds more Long Beach flights as Southwest encroaches
JetBlue will expand at Long Beach as it begins utilizing all of its slots at the capacity controlled Southern California airport. The expansion comes amid new competition from discount rival Southwest, which just began flying from Long Beach in June.
JetBlue’s latest destination from the Long Beach Airport will come on an intra-California route to San Jose. Four daily round-trip flights begin Jan. 4.
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San Jose will be JetBlue’s 13th nonstop destination from Long Beach, where the airport’s schedule is now capped at 50 daily departures and arrivals for regular commercial airline flights. JetBlue holds the rights to 35 of those flight “slots,” each of which allows a takeoff and landing at the airport.
Though JetBlue is the biggest carrier at Long Beach, it historically not used all of its available slots there. That prompted city officials last month to give temporary use of some of JetBlue’s unused slots to Southwest, which announced it would use them to compete head-to-head with JetBlue on the Long Beach-Las Vegas route. Southwest’s “temporary” Las Vegas-Long Beach flights run through Dec. 31.
JetBlue’s move to begin using all 35 of its Long Beach slots comes about two weeks after city officials announced their plan to let Southwest to begin using some of the unused slots.
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Beyond the JetBlue’s new San Jose service, JetBlue also plans to beef up service on three routes it already serves from Long Beach. The additional flights -- to Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and San Francisco -- will begin in November.
JetBlue’s Long Beach-Las Vegas service will increase to seven daily round-trip flights, up from four. With the additional flights, JetBlue will offer a flight between the cities about every two hours, according to the airline’s published schedule.
Elsewhere, JetBlue will add one additional daily round-trip to both San Francisco and Salt Lake City. Once the new flights begin, JetBlue will fly five round-trips a day between San Francisco and Long Beach and four a day between Salt Lake City and Long Beach.
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The San Jose flights coupled with the increases on existing routes will give JetBlue 35 daily departures from Long Beach, its busiest schedule ever there.
"It is terrific that JetBlue, Long Beach's largest airline, is adding more flights to its existing destinations of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and San Francisco and even better that they are bringing back service to San Jose as they utilize all of their slots in Long Beach," Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia says in a statement from JetBlue.
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