As more and more airlines rolled out Basic Economy fares, JetBlue saw a unique opportunity to introduce its take on Basic Economy with the introduction of "Blue Basic." This new fare allows customers to bring a personal item - a differentiator from competitor Basic Economy fares, although customers have to pay for advanced seat selection, are restricted on changing or canceling their itinerary, and board last. In addition to the introduction of Blue Basic, JetBlue revisited all of its fare offerings to ensure they were realigned to customer preferences and introduced pre-paid checked bags.

Given that this program was e-commerce focused, our team was responsible for the overall digital product experience, engineering implementation, and final delivery. However, changing the fare offering impacted 26 different workstreams throughout the company - everything from Customer Support booking applications to check-in products, boarding logic, airport information displays, in-flight Crewmember iPad apps, etc.

When this program originally kicked off in October 2018, as Lead Business Analyst my role was to capture the detailed requirements for all JetBlue digital products, gaining alignment from stakeholders. Shortly after the project started, I was promoted into the Product Manager role. From here, I led the digital design and implementation, tracked status, triaged defects, and kept senior leadership abreast of the overall status.

There were several challenges the team encountered throughout the way. From a customer experience perspective, we wanted to ensure customers understood that our basic economy offering is not what they are used to with other airlines. In partnership with the Brand team, we introduced several touch points along the flow educating customers on the restrictions and benefits of every fare to be as transparent as possible. From a technical perspective, the number of changes to the back-end services and front-end UI and the number of other tech products this project parallelly impacted was immense for the amount of time we had to get this live. To ensure all 26 workstreams were executing effectively we established wall walks, weekly status meetings, and daily troubleshooting sessions.

In addition to delivering the project on time, under budget, and with quality, the program exceeded Revenue Management, Brand, and Customer Support KPIs. From a digital analytics perspective, there were concerns that a more restrictive fare and additional modals throughout the flow may negatively impact funnel advancement and overall conversation rate. However, these metrics also showed steady improvement.

Below are a few press articles surrounding the launch:

• JetBlue enters the basic economy battle with a ‘humane’ take on budget fares | The Washington Post
• JetBlue enters basic economy battle with new fare options | Reuters
• JetBlue is the latest airline to sell basic economy | Business Insider
• JetBlue rolls out ‘Blue Basic’ fares as it battles budget rivals | The Points Guy
• JetBlue Introduces Basic Economy Fares | One Mile at a Time