Best of The Business Report: Breeze Airways CEO David Neelman Interview

is 2021 a good year to launch an airline well according to the people at Breeze Airways that's a yes their CEO joins us to tell us why and joining us now from Park City Utah is David neilan he's the CEO of Breeze Airways and the former CEO of JetBlue David thanks so much for coming on well thank you thanks for having me on I appreciate it so I want to start with the elephant in the room here seems like a weird time to start an airline why now uh well we we started this before Co and you know obviously there was what we saw was there were a lot of airlines that were pulling out of small and mediumsized routes or forcing customers to go uh through hubs and so we just saw a lot of markets where we had Direct non-stop service where we didn't have to connect through a hub and now you know in as we as Co we're getting through Co and in the middle of covid it's just even more uh attractive to be able to do that you know to be able to just hop on a plane and go for an hour and 15 or an hour and 20 minutes as opposed to you know making a connection and taking three and a half hours to do it you know because you got masks and you got all the stuff you have to deal with and but you still want to travel you still want to get away so um you know it's it's not ideal we wish it never would have happened but you know we're making the best of it well so you are a budget carrier what kind of makes you different than other budget carriers well uh about 95% 95% of our routes today we have 39 routes uh we have no non-stop competition so if you want to go from Huntsville to Charleston if you want to go from New Orleans to kanton akan if you want to go to all these places you know we're the only ones that can take you there and you know our kind of montre is will get you there for twice as fast for half the price so it it's just a huge advantage that we have uh over our competitors and we're really not even competing in a sense we're competing with the couch and maybe you know the outdoor barbecue or you know some kind of get together because you know what we really have is is is something that stimulates traffic you know 10 to 20 times in a market from the existing travel traffic that's there today because of the convenience and because of of the fair can you tell me a little bit about the flying experience what can passengers expect if they get on one of your flights well we kind of build ourselves as the the nicest Airline so you know we're going to we're g to we're going to be nice but even before that before you get on the airplane um you know we've got a very userfriendly app uh we instead of waiting on hold for a call center for four hours maybe uh you can send us a message we get right back to you if you have a question you can book change cancel or do anything so our technology is amazing we like to say where technology coming your SS to fly airplanes and then you get on you have nice friendly people and and the flights are short and quick and and really great um you know we're rolling out a system where you can on your handheld device or on your iPad you can watch movies as well for free so it's it's just uh cheap but cheerful and and really um amazing people people love flying on Bree well so you mentioned short Hall flights so you're not exploring anything from like the East to the West Coast uh or so on it's a good segue uh we just announced yesterday um that we're going to have we're adding to our Fleet number of our 220s so our Airbus a 220s um you know we had ordered 60 of them firm and we just announced we've added another 20 now the 220 is a different kind of airplane that we're flying today our first one comes next month we'll be flying them towards the end of the first quarter maybe early second quarter of next year once we get all the certifications with the FAA but this plane will be flying long haul this will be it's a much different airplane it can fly six seven hours and so we can do some uh a lot of flying between cities that don't have non-stop service there's even more the longer you go there's more and more opportunities for a plane like the the Airbus a220 what about covid protocols a lot of airlines that's kind of the big debate right now United just made the announcement last month that 6 their 67,000 employees must be vaccinated uh to essentially work for the airline what about you guys what are your protocols well you know first of all we believe that natural immunity matters and it counts and it's easy to get an antibody test so for you know our people were saying yeah you can either get vaccinated or you can show us an antibody test or if you don't want to do uh either one of those then you can you have to be tested weekly uh just to make sure that you're you're Co free so we're more flexible than United but I think the big thing is this this antibod I got mine yesterday I went down it took me five minutes I got a really strong score of antibodies and so you know it g it gave me peace of mind and confidence okay David neilan CEO of Breeze Airways thanks so much for coming on thank you