JetBlue is betting big on Fort Lauderdale Airport

JetBlue Airlines It’s already the largest 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 of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

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

JetBlue had been looking to expand into Fort Lauderdale even before Spirit Airlines, the South Florida-based discount carrier that was No. 1 at the airport, collapsed on May 2 under the weight of debt and years of mounting problems.

JetBlue is now the largest airline with a 36% market share in terms of capacity at the airport, according to Cirium’s 2026 capacity count, up from about 24% the year before. From May to June of this year, JetBlue added an additional 5% capacity, while larger rivals pulled out for the holiday season in Florida, according to Cirium.

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

Just hours after Spirit’s collapse, JetBlue and other airlines made their own travel plans, adding flights to fill the void in Fort Lauderdale.

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

“I feel very optimistic about how customers will respond to JetBlue’s growth,” St. George said.

JetBlue says it plans further growth as additional gates become available after Spirit’s demise. Some of those portals 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 includes Presidents’ Day weekend and some school holidays, a schedule that would put it on par with JetBlue’s Boston Logan International Airport hub, the largest after New York.

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

St. George said the carrier is reviewing lounge locations — which will be the third in its network — in Fort Lauderdale to meet the needs of those customers. It already has lounges at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Boston.

“It is not clear now where we will establish a hall,” he said. “I think the airport employees are equally excited to have a lounge there. Given the size of our operations and the number of discerning customers that come in and out of Fort Lauderdale, I think [it makes] Very logical, we just have to find the right location.”

The big competitive threat lies about 26 miles south, at Miami International Airport American Airlines A center that dwarfs Fort Lauderdale. Both airports, although 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 are quite a few customers [whom] “Miami is the right airport, one that will never leave Miami, and we don’t plan to divert those customers,” St. George said. “I think as we get more service to Fort Lauderdale as a broader range of destinations, the utility of Lauderdale Airport will go up.”

American said on Friday that it plans to operate a record 100 destinations to the Caribbean, Mexico and other Latin American airports from the United States, with 77 of them departing from Miami, including a new flight to Maracaibo, Venezuela, starting July 14 and to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, starting November 1.

JetBlue, for its part, recently announced Fort Lauderdale to Caracas service, where the airline is building flights. American announced in January that it would resume service to Venezuela from the United States for the first time since 2019, weeks after the United States arrested the President of Venezuela.