I think it may be difficult to say for certain. I am of the belief that they expanded too fast (the point I made in the last thread regarding this issue) and that is bad news for an airline, it just doesn’t work, but whether it is a short term blip is difficult to predict because JetBlue has apporached the low fare model from a different angle (there have been high service LCCs before, but not on this scale, and lets face it, many of them have gone bust) so they are still breaking new ground to some extent. Hence we don’t have examples of how these model can succeed.

I think its interestig to note that they are reverting back to focusing on shorter routes, which isn’t much of a surpise. LCC airlines tend to find that the amount people are willing to pay for a flight is not proportionate to the distance travelled (and indeed this is true for all airlines), and so they can charge higher fares against distance travelled over shorter routes. This admittedly has cost implications because you’re paying more airport charges, maintenance and possibly even crew costs, but this is more than made up for by being able to charge more for the distance flown…if any of this makes sense! LOL