JetBlue’s extra legroom coach Even More Space seating will be rebranded as EvenMore next year. It will be sold as a bundle, instead of as a paid seating upsell. It could include things like free alcoholic beverages. It will not mean configuring planes or replacing seats.
In other words they are abandoning plans for Mini Mint domestic first class.
There will still be a premium cabin, but the seats will not change. The product would be similar to a European Style Euro-Business product along the lines of what Frontier has launched.,,Blocked middle seats are also probably part of the mix, but plans to create a de facto first class cabin dubbed by media as Mini-Mint or Junior Mint are gone.
Update: aviation watchdog JonNYC says the domestic first class plan is not dead!
On JetBlue’s announcement today regarding rebranding /bundling of their more space seating and the assumption that that means JetBlue is abandoned it’s rumored first class project (less that full Mint but more than Even More Space)
That assumption is wrong.
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) October 29, 2024
JetBlue had been expected to install MiQ seats, similar to what American Airlines and many other carriers use, offering a domestic first class product on routes that served with their international business class Mint equivalent.
Reconfiguring planes and buying new seats is expensive, and JetBlue is slashing costs, for instance dropping hot meals in economy on transatlantic flights. They’re spending for lounges in New York and Boston, but worked out a deal for Barclays, their credit card issuer, to be paying on those.
Spirit Airlines only has first class seating because it was cheaper to leave the seats in place when they became a low cost carrier. JetBlue is keeping its seats. Southwest’s new premium seats will also be the same seats – with extra legroom, but no blocked middles because the IT is complicated.
Frontier, though, sells blocked middle seats. Perhaps JetBlue will offer that too. On airlines and flights where planes aren’t full it’s certainly advantageous and something they can sell to both the window and aisle passenger, generating incremental revenue for a seat that would otherwise remain empty. And honestly extra legroom and a blocked middle seat, with complimentary cocktails, is pretty much domestic first class anyway. (I avoid Frontier mostly due to lack of any inflight internet.)
The good news in JetBlue dropping plans for domestic first class is that they’d been understood to be putting in that product while keeping the same total number of seats. That would have meant reducing the amount of legroom in standard coach which is something that Southwest plans to do as they add extra legroom seats to about a third of each plane’s cabin. Meanwhile, even Spirit is bundling upgraded snacks with its up front product.