One week after the start of JetBlue’s Valentines Day operational fiasco and they’ve come back with an official response to this crisis. The response includes a Customer Bill of Rights which defines a series of retributions if your flight is delayed, a full page apology in the NY Times, and an email letter to customers. This is a pretty strong statement from a company that’s taken a beating in the press and a pretty big hit on Wall Street. In a nutshell, JetBlue admitted to significant issues with their ability to recover from the initial delays caused by the storms on Valentines Day and has come back with what essentially is a SLA (service level agreement) on their performance. Unlike many technology SLA’s, this one has teeth and defines conditions for which specific retributions will be made and other actions that they guarantee.

You can learn a lot on crisis management from JetBlue’s response.

• Contain and recover from the problem – Bring back operational stability quickly, safely, and painlessly.
• Own up to the issues and problems.
• Communicate with customers, especially the ones that were most affected by the crisis.
• Respond with a strong statement and commitment to improving quality and service levels.
• There is a small question on how quickly they can really implement the systems to track these service levels, report on hot sports, implement the retributions, and handle customer service issues related to their Bill of Rights.

JetBlue now has a real hard cost to delays and other service level issues. It’s a big price tag, but now that the cost can be quantified, it will give JetBlue real incentive to make operational, service, and other improvements to minimize these costs. Does this mean that JetBlue will raise prices to offset these costs? Will they cut services or destinations that become unprofitable given these new costs? Will other airlines follow suit?