Markets

JetBlue's All-You-Can-Jet Turns Back to Twitter to Fill Seats

By Brett Snyder

Updated on: August 18, 2010 / 11:07 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

Last year, JetBlue (JBLU) launched the All You Can Jet Pass for 30 days following Labor Day. The response was incredible and it was a resounding success. Now JetBlue is doing it again, but will it be able to recreate the magic? It won't be the same, but it will still achieve the goal of filling seats. It'll be a winner.

The idea is a simple and brilliant one. Beginning the day after Labor Day last year, you could fly on as many flights as you wanted for the next 30 days for only $599 (plus international tax). There were no capacity restrictions, so it really was a fantastic deal.

All You Can Jet blogs popped up, and Wired magazine even sponsored Terminal Man to fly around every day during the month. It was a PR bonanza and it filled seats during the low post-Labor Day season. It was a fantastic move that created a ton of goodwill and built a huge amount of buzz.

And now, JetBlue is doing it again. This time, it's been tweaked a little bit. Now, if you're willing to avoid flying on Friday and Sunday, you can save $100 and do it for $499. If you want to do it every day of the week, it's $699. Good move to push people to the even lower demand flights during an already low demand season.

But like BB King says; will the thrill be gone? It was a novelty last year, but are we really going to see the kind of publicity that we saw back then? No. It's just not as exciting anymore. But that publicity was a welcome side effect of the true goal - to fill seats during a quiet time. Will the airline still be able to do that? Absolutely.

Interestingly, the airline has really jumped on the Twitter bandwagon for this one, hoping to make that its primary (and free) marketing vehicle. People not familiar with Twitter will probably be confused by the headline in the press release:

JetBlue Airways' All You Can Jet(TM) (#AYCJ(TM)) Pass is Back!

But Twitter loyalists know that the hashtag (#) is how you mark something in Twitter. This is the hashtag people used last year, and now JetBlue wants to reactivate the base to start using it. In fact, the hashtag shows up nine times in the press release alone. So how's it going?

Well, it's absolutely blowing up, in a good way. I've seen over a thousand tweets in one day alone, and it's probably a lot more than that, but I got bored looking. Some tweets have people looking for travel partners. There was another about a massage company that's giving discounts to #AYCJ travelers passing through Washington. It just goes on and on, and that's music to JetBlue's proverbial ears.

It's rare that a fare sale can fill this many seats, but in this case, it has proven to work once. Judging by the response on Twitter, it's likely to do it again. And the marketing costs? Nothing. You can't beat that.

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Photo via Flickr user Doug Letterman