JetBlue Airways Aims for Greater Dominance in Fort Lauderdale

JetBlue Airways is already the biggest airline in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and it wants to get even bigger.

"Lauderdale has been a star for us," JetBlue President Marty St. George said this month about Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Capitalizing on growth at the Broward County airport is key for JetBlue as it revamps its network and rolls out more high-end options like a domestic first-class cabin to return to profitability. Its last profitable quarter was two years ago.

JetBlue was looking to expand in Fort Lauderdale even before Spirit Airlines, the South Florida-based discounter that was No. 1 at the airport, collapsed on May 2 under the weight of debt and years of snowballing problems.

JetBlue is now the top carrier with 36% market share by capacity at the airport, according to a Cirium tally of 2026 capacity, up from about 24% a year earlier. From May to June of this year, JetBlue added 5% more capacity, while big competitors pulled back in the Florida offseason, according to Cirium.

The carrier has about 106 flights scheduled a day for this year on average, up from about 68 a day last year, Cirium data shows.

Just hours after Spirit's collapse, JetBlue and other airlines laid out their own travel plans, adding flights to fill the void at Fort Lauderdale.

JetBlue raised its revenue forecast for the year on June 1, citing strong demand.

"I'm feeling very, very bullish about how customers have responded to JetBlue's growth," St. George said.

JetBlue says it's planning for even more growth as additional gates become available after Spirit's demise. Some of those gates are still tied up in bankruptcy court.

JetBlue's plan is to operate about 150 daily flights at Fort Lauderdale in the peak winter months, which include Presidents Day weekend and some school breaks, a schedule that will put it on par with JetBlue's Boston Logan International Airport hub, its largest after New York.

The plan includes more international destinations leaving from Fort Lauderdale and a focus on premium air travel.

St. George said the carrier has been reviewing sites for a lounge — which would be the third in its network — at Fort Lauderdale to cater to those customers. It already has lounges at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and in Boston.

"It is unclear right now where we would put a lounge," he said. "The airport folks, I think, are equally motivated to have a lounge down there. Certainly, given the size of our operation and the number of premium customers going in and out of Fort Lauderdale, I think [it makes] a lot of sense, we just have to find the right location."

The big competitive threat lies about 26 miles south, at Miami International Airport, an American Airlines hub that dwarfs Fort Lauderdale. Both airports, though Miami is much larger, are major hubs for leisure customers as well as those visiting friends and relatives in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"There's a good number of customers for [whom] Miami is the right airport, who will never leave Miami, and we're not planning on converting those customers," St. George said. "I do think that as we get more service in Fort Lauderdale as a bigger breadth of destinations, that utility of Lauderdale Airport will go up."

American on Friday said it plans to operate a record 100 destinations to the Caribbean, Mexico and other airports in Latin America from the U.S., with 77 of them leaving from Miami, including a new flight to Maracaibo, Venezuela, from July 14 and to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, starting Nov. 1.

JetBlue, for its part, announced Fort Lauderdale to Caracas service recently, as carriers build up flights. American in January announced it would resume resume service to Venezuela from the United States for the first time since 2019, weeks after the U.S. captured Venezuela's president.