JetBlue's privacy violations and ethical implications of low-cost pricing

JetBlue's main competitors can be considered Southwest in the United States, together with Ryanair and Easyjet in Europe and AirAsia in Asia. However, we need to mention from the very beginning that the international issues we need to address are at most continental or regional.

Indeed, the most important low-cost flyers have split the influence zones between them, with Easyjet being the market leader in Europe and covering exclusively this zone and AirAsia doing the same in Asia. As for JetBlue, it covers the Untied States, as well as smaller states in the Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In my opinion, I don't think that JetBlue can become, in the short run, a significant competitor on the international market, mainly because it does not presently have the necessary infrastructure and logistics that are needed for a global player.

Legal Issues

The legal issues we need to discuss refer to privacy policy violations. As I will be discussing when talking about ethical issues, using private information on passengers in order to differentiate pricing is something that we may debate whether it is ethical or not. It isn't, however, illegal.

On the other hand, on September 19, 2003, "JetBlue Airways publicly acknowledged it had provided the travel records of five million JetBlue customers to Torch Concepts, a private DoD (Department of Defense) contractor for an antiterrorism study to track high-risk passengers or suspected terrorists"

The legal issue concerned here was quite important and referred to two different aspects. First of all, it did not abide by the JetBlue's Online Privacy Policy and made its passengers' data, including financial data and social securities numbers, available to another company for a study. Its privacy policy states: "the financial and personal information collected on this site is not shared with any third parties"

. This was obviously not what happened.

Second of all, and even more dramatic than the prior situation, some of the data were actually published in a study that circulated freely over the Internet. We should not mention the effect this could have had, especially in these times when we are dealing with the most sophisticated forms of identity theft and computer fraud.

Third of all, we may even notice several malfunctions in the contract between JetBlue and Open Skies Inc., the company that powers JetBlue's ticketing system. In this sense, the contract does not clearly stipulate what Open Skies Inc.'s obligations are in terms of privacy protection.

Strategy plan with respect to online selling

In my opinion, the main strategic objective of any company, here included JetBlue, is to obtain a competitive advantage over the other firms. In our particular case, we need to find the proper means by which e-business can prove an advantage for JetBlue in the long run.

The most important thing to be kept in mind is the relationship with the customers

. By nature, it is more difficult in the case of e-commerce to have a direct relationship with your clients, because we are referring here to invisible transactions, where the provider and client do not meet face-to-face.

Customer retention and customer satisfaction can be done here by direct marketing, for example. The company has a database with the clients that have been using JetBlue, including their personal data. Every special holiday or on the respective individual's birthday, the company can send an email with a congratulations message. As long as it does not transform into annoying spam, regular information and updates on the services the company provides are more than welcome.

Of course, the second thing the company needs to do is clear its name and convince the public that the problem related to its privacy policy was a simple mistake. This would encourage people to return to online bookings and ticket purchasing. However, as I have previously mentioned, the present conditions are not favorable to such actions: people have become increasingly aware of identity theft risks and are less willing to turn to the Internet for purchases.

On-line selling should also include a differentiated approach to the different types of customers that JetBlue has. Who are JetBlue's likeliest customers? First of all, people with lower incomes, who are willing to give up some of their airline facilities in order to reduce the cost of their plane ticket. In my opinion, this is the customer segment that JetBlue should insist on expanding. This can be done by addressing the particular needs of customers with lower income. One such example would be, for example, return facilities for people who go and visit their relatives on holiday (the possibility of going away on Christmas Eve at the same price as in any other day of the week, etc.)