Speaker 1: Pushkin. Airfares are through the roof. You know this, and
Speaker 1: of course a key driver is the price of oil.
Speaker 1: But you know oil is not the only cost for airlines.
Speaker 1: Airlines have to pay staff and buy or lease planes
Speaker 1: and acquire customers. So it seems like right now is
Speaker 1: a great moment to take one of my favorite questions
Speaker 1: in general and apply it to the airline industry, how
Speaker 1: do you use technology to make stuff cheaper? And for
Speaker 1: today's show, I found the perfect person to answer that
Speaker 1: question for airfares. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's
Speaker 1: Your Problem, the show where entrepreneurs and engineers talk about
Speaker 1: how they're going to change the world once they solve
Speaker 1: a few problems. My guest today is David Neilaman. David
Speaker 1: has founded by airlines, including most famously Jet Blue. Also,
Speaker 1: he founded a Brazilian airline called a Zool, where he
Speaker 1: is still the controlling shareholder, and most recently, David founded
Speaker 1: a new US discount airline called Breeze. David's problem is this,
Speaker 1: how do you use technology to drive down the price
Speaker 1: of air travel. Most of my conversation with David was
Speaker 1: about what he's working on at Breeze, but when I
Speaker 1: asked him about technology, he couldn't resist going back to
Speaker 1: the beginning of his career for just a minute. He
Speaker 1: started out booking package tours. Then in the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: he launched an airline called Morris Air. And one of
Speaker 1: the first things he noticed was how inconvenient and inefficient
Speaker 1: paper tickets were. Tickets were like negotiable documents. They were
Speaker 1: like checks, and they would be issued and if you
Speaker 1: lost that thing, haven't forbid. Basically, they'd say, well, we'll
Speaker 1: have to wait one hundred and eighty days or longer
Speaker 1: to see if anyone uses your ticket. I don't use it,
Speaker 1: then we'll give you a refund. And so I can
Speaker 1: still remember, there's this guy named Stuart Thatcher, and he
Speaker 1: walked to my office and he said, we had all
Speaker 1: these people upstairs putting tickets in envelopes and mailing them
Speaker 1: out to people. He said, why don't we just give
Speaker 1: them a confirmation number, and then we'll put it on
Speaker 1: these little things that we can run through a machine
Speaker 1: and he can fold it quickly, and we'll just mail
Speaker 1: him a confirmation number. And then I looked at him
Speaker 1: and said, well, why would you give him a confirmation
Speaker 1: number over the phone. You sort of invented the Yeah,
Speaker 1: tickless travel, tickless travel. Yeah, I mean Southwest when they
Speaker 1: purchased Morris Aera, they didn't really realize what a great
Speaker 1: thing they did. So okay, so that's the forty years
Speaker 1: ago story. What is the thing you're doing now that
Speaker 1: forty years from now you're gonna be like, back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, I was doing X. What's X? Well?
Speaker 1: I think what X is is taken a page from
Speaker 1: Amazon and from Lyft and from Airbnb. You don't ever
Speaker 1: want to talk to anybody. You want to have an
Speaker 1: app that people can do everything on and if they
Speaker 1: can't and if they get like frustrated, you want to
Speaker 1: have the ability for someone to ask you a question
Speaker 1: in writing that you can get back to them and
Speaker 1: the goal is in less than ten minutes and solve
Speaker 1: any issue they have so that you never have to
Speaker 1: have a call center. And that's cheaper for you than
Speaker 1: a call center because because it's asynchronous, because you can
Speaker 1: be talking to six people at one time. Huh. So
Speaker 1: you have six people at one time, you can be
Speaker 1: dealing their issues because not not you know, what's your
Speaker 1: confirmation number? They have to go find it or whatever
Speaker 1: that takes time. Okay, so that's a good one. So
Speaker 1: so having people basically text instead of call, that's a
Speaker 1: technological innovation that's going to lower your costs. What else,
Speaker 1: what's another one, Well, it's well, it starts with the app.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to have an app that's completely
Speaker 1: functional so you can self help. So if we said,
Speaker 1: you know, you want to change a flight, change your
Speaker 1: own flight you want to. You know, if we we've
Speaker 1: canceled flight on you because of whatever reason, you know,
Speaker 1: we can send you the option push this button to
Speaker 1: book on the other flight we have you on, or
Speaker 1: push this bent to get a full refund and credit
Speaker 1: for your next flight. It's all the self help things
Speaker 1: where you're taking care of yourself and you don't need
Speaker 1: to talk to one of us to do anything, and
Speaker 1: only when you get frustrated then you actually text us.
Speaker 1: But having a functional app that does all the stuff
Speaker 1: that an Uber app does or an Amazon app does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so right, So in the same way that Amazon, say,
Speaker 1: makes it really easy to return things. Right, So I
Speaker 1: don't have to call if I want to return something,
Speaker 1: I just click a couple of buttons, print out the thing.
Speaker 1: And it's done. I don't have to call them. It's
Speaker 1: like that. If I want to change my flight or
Speaker 1: anything like that, an app with full functionality as much
Speaker 1: as possible, and then we can add on to that.
Speaker 1: And one more thing I want to mention. You know,
Speaker 1: if you book, if you book through Expedia or you
Speaker 1: book through one of these other online travel agencies, we
Speaker 1: don't have your information. They keep it because they guard it.
Speaker 1: You can't book a reservation with us unless you give
Speaker 1: us your cell phone number or your email. You have
Speaker 1: to give it to us. So that way, if there
Speaker 1: is a disruption or when there's boarding time and all
Speaker 1: that stuff, we can communicate directly with you all the time.
Speaker 1: Interesting and usually airlines about forty or more, they don't
Speaker 1: have that information for their customers and we have that.
Speaker 1: So that that's another important factor that we just decide
Speaker 1: to start. It's hard to change that once you're going,
Speaker 1: but once you start from a clean white piece of paper,
Speaker 1: you can do that. And so presumably that not only
Speaker 1: allows you to whatever, text me updates about my flight,
Speaker 1: but it also allows you to text me updates if
Speaker 1: you have a discount on that flight in six months
Speaker 1: or whatever. Right now, I'm in the system. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: in our database. We can do some data mining and
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, what you like, what you don't like,
Speaker 1: and make sure that we target market instead of just
Speaker 1: blast out crap that you don't want to read. Everything's
Speaker 1: relevant to you. So there's this there's this trade off
Speaker 1: I've heard you describe from when you were launching jet
Speaker 1: Blue that was super interesting to me, and I'm curious
Speaker 1: to hear you talk about that, and then I'm curious
Speaker 1: to learn whether there's any kind of analog in launching Breeze.
Speaker 1: And the trade off for Jet Blue was having live
Speaker 1: TV and not having meals. And this was a time when, ay,
Speaker 1: you pretty much always got a meal on a long flight,
Speaker 1: and b live TV on an airplane was like science fiction. Right,
Speaker 1: It's twenty years ago. Netflix was DVDs in the mail.
Speaker 1: You couldn't watch TV on your computer. So I remember
Speaker 1: it was wild having live TV. So tell me about
Speaker 1: launching an airline at that time that had live TV
Speaker 1: but non meals. You know, it was a simple mathematical equation,
Speaker 1: you know, I have It's well known that I have
Speaker 1: add and I just get I used to hate to
Speaker 1: travel on airplanes. Because it was hard for me to
Speaker 1: read a book. It was hard to just sit there,
Speaker 1: and I just wanted to be entertained. I didn't have
Speaker 1: I didn't have a smartphone, I didn't have an iPhone,
Speaker 1: and I was kind of going crazy at the time.
Speaker 1: And so I was sitting in my office and I
Speaker 1: was trying to figure out if we could have movies
Speaker 1: in the seatbacks, and there was a couple of different
Speaker 1: outfits that were doing that. And then you know, one
Speaker 1: of our people walked in with this brochure and said, Hey,
Speaker 1: there's live television on these are on these private jets.
Speaker 1: Why don't we put that on our airplanes? And it
Speaker 1: was just like boom, that light went on and we
Speaker 1: talked to them and it was about a dollar a
Speaker 1: passenger per flight, and the other guys were paying about
Speaker 1: five bucks for mills for meals. Yeah, it's like five
Speaker 1: bucks for mills or one buck for live TV, you know.
Speaker 1: And I can just have baskets to snacks that cost
Speaker 1: less than a dollar. What's going to be more impactful
Speaker 1: with my brand new airplanes? And it just kind of
Speaker 1: blew everybody away. It was it was something that was
Speaker 1: so new and so exciting and it changed flying right.
Speaker 1: It was so unexpected, especially for what was basically a
Speaker 1: discount airline at launch, Like so you gotta move like that? Now,
Speaker 1: what is that? But for Breeze, you know, I think
Speaker 1: I think just getting on and flying first class for
Speaker 1: fifty percent more than coach, having streaming, you know, internet
Speaker 1: being served at flemingon Sandwich. So first class first class
Speaker 1: for about how much? Like give me an example of
Speaker 1: a first class fair on a route. Well, because the
Speaker 1: configuration the airplane, we only have to get fifty percent
Speaker 1: more for the ticket. So if we have a ticket
Speaker 1: for two hundred bucks, for an next one hundred dollars,
Speaker 1: you can go first class. So people right now are
Speaker 1: flying what's a transcontinental route you have going? Right now?
Speaker 1: We fly to Charleston, San Francisco. So are people right
Speaker 1: now flying from Charleston to San Francisco first class for
Speaker 1: three hundred dollars? Yeah, three hundred bucks each way? Okay,
Speaker 1: six hundred bucks round trip? Still very good. I will
Speaker 1: admit I'm going to California and I paid six hundred
Speaker 1: bucks more to fly coach, So I find that a
Speaker 1: compelling offer. So the cheap, cheap, relatively speaking, first class
Speaker 1: ticket is a big move. How do you do that?
Speaker 1: How do you get the cost down so you can
Speaker 1: do that? Well, we have you know, fuel fishing airplanes
Speaker 1: that are perceied, the most fuel fishing airplanes in the sky,
Speaker 1: you know, having less overhead and less not thousands of
Speaker 1: IT people, but you know, tens of IT people, and
Speaker 1: just trying to you know, be efficient and use technology
Speaker 1: every step of the way. So is the place where
Speaker 1: your costs are lower than other airlines? Not so much
Speaker 1: the on the plane part, not so much the pilots
Speaker 1: and the flight attendants, but rather having fewer IT people,
Speaker 1: fewer fewer customer service people. That's where you're hoping to
Speaker 1: really drive down costs. Yes, but it's really technology that
Speaker 1: the drives all that. And if you start with a clean,
Speaker 1: right sheet of paper, it's just a lot easier to
Speaker 1: do that than if you stuck with a bunch of
Speaker 1: legacy systems. I want to talk about routes now. I
Speaker 1: feel like routes are like kind of part of the
Speaker 1: like fun inside baseball of how what's actually going on
Speaker 1: with airlines? You know, we get dazzled by a TV
Speaker 1: in the seats, but there's these weird route choices that
Speaker 1: seem to make a big difference. That's another one where
Speaker 1: maybe it's worth just briefly to talk about Jet Blue
Speaker 1: because I feel like that was also clearly one of
Speaker 1: the big moves there, and in particular was the first
Speaker 1: route at Jet Blue flying out at JFK to Fort Lauderdale.
Speaker 1: Like that, it was a clever strategic move, right, tell
Speaker 1: me about that choice. Well, you know, JEK was interesting
Speaker 1: because jeff K was pretty much an abandoned airport. So
Speaker 1: you'd you'd go JFK to LA, you'd go to London
Speaker 1: and Paris, all around the world, but you wouldn't fly
Speaker 1: to Miami from JFK. I like, why not? It was
Speaker 1: funny because when I was running, I was raising money
Speaker 1: for jeff Blue in New York City. I'd meet these
Speaker 1: people and say and they'd say, I live in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: I'm never going to go to jeff K to go
Speaker 1: to Florida because it's so much farther than LaGuardia because
Speaker 1: it's an hour instead of a half hour. Right, LaGuardia
Speaker 1: is a half hour at jfk' is an hour hour
Speaker 1: and a half. Yeah, it depends on where you live
Speaker 1: in Manhattan. But it was it's eight miles. Well, hey,
Speaker 1: miles in New York City could be a lot miles. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be a lot. So I said, I don't
Speaker 1: care because people leave from their homes. And I got
Speaker 1: five million people that live in Queens and Brooklyn and
Speaker 1: Long Island that are closer or as close as LaGuardia,
Speaker 1: and I'll take care of those people. I don't need
Speaker 1: anyone from Manhattan. But you know, obviously, when we had
Speaker 1: the light TVs and leather seats, Manhattan Night's spent that
Speaker 1: extra thirty minutes coming out to JFK. So was the
Speaker 1: idea that it was cheaper to get a gate at
Speaker 1: JFK in the middle of the day than it was
Speaker 1: at LaGuardia because nobody was flying out of there then,
Speaker 1: I mean, was that the core sort of thing. Well,
Speaker 1: LaGuardia was slow controlled, so we couldn't fly to there
Speaker 1: if we wanted to at the time. So it was
Speaker 1: all full. So it's okay, all full. The national growth
Speaker 1: and air traffic was exponentially more than New York was.
Speaker 1: New York was being held down by really high fares
Speaker 1: because nobody was adding service out of JFK, and that
Speaker 1: airport was pretty well during the day, you could shoot
Speaker 1: a cannon down the runway and not hit anything, So
Speaker 1: you know that was available, and it was less delayed
Speaker 1: flights at the time, and all of that stuff that
Speaker 1: made it such a compelling story, not to mention all
Speaker 1: the people that lived closer to JFK than lived closer
Speaker 1: to LaGuardia. Yeah, so it's really Manhattan centric bias that
Speaker 1: you were overcoming. That was the real move there. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I notice. So, so let's talk about Breeze now and
Speaker 1: the routes you've chosen for Breeze. Right, in terms of
Speaker 1: New York where I live. I noticed you fly into Westchester,
Speaker 1: which is the suburbs north of New York, and I Slip,
Speaker 1: which is basically the suburbs east of New York. But
Speaker 1: you don't fly into Laguardi or JFK or New Work.
Speaker 1: Your inaugural flight was Tampa, Florida to Charleston, South Carolina,
Speaker 1: which is unexpected to me. So, like, tell me what's
Speaker 1: going on, Well, like, tell me about the route strategy
Speaker 1: for Breeze. Well, in so at long fact that every
Speaker 1: airline has to put all of their data into and
Speaker 1: send it to the DOT, and the Dot puts it
Speaker 1: in a database to the Department of Transportation Transportation, so
Speaker 1: we know who flies between what routes an annual basis quarterly,
Speaker 1: and what they paid or they paid for their ticket.
Speaker 1: Oh great, So it's like complete competitive intelligence is available
Speaker 1: to anybody wants to mind it. So we look at
Speaker 1: it and and we say, what's the largest market from Richmond, GA.
Speaker 1: That's an unserved NonStop and what's the average person paying?
Speaker 1: And it was San Francisco. So all these people were
Speaker 1: flying whatever Richmond to Salt Lake City to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: or Richmond to Charlotte to San Francisco. But there was
Speaker 1: no direct flight, Yes, no direct flights. And so we
Speaker 1: have our own little special sauce that we use in
Speaker 1: our little formula that if we say, if we can
Speaker 1: take someone NonStop, if we can, you know, the fair
Speaker 1: is down thirty percent and we go NonStop, we can
Speaker 1: x times the size of the market. We can make
Speaker 1: it four times bigger, five times biggers, in some cases
Speaker 1: twenty times bigger. So you're saying, if you make it
Speaker 1: cheaper because you're cheaper and more convenient because it's NonStop,
Speaker 1: lots more people will do it. Yes, we'll do it.
Speaker 1: And it's more convenient and they just go more often.
Speaker 1: And so I mean the core move you're making is
Speaker 1: flying NonStop out of and often between kind of second
Speaker 1: tier cities market, right, I mean that's the core thin
Speaker 1: you're doing, flying between cities that don't have NonStop service basically,
Speaker 1: and it you know, those are would more likely be
Speaker 1: a secondary market. And so is this I mean, why
Speaker 1: wasn't anybody doing this before? Like it seems like very
Speaker 1: straightforward when you put it that way, like there's just
Speaker 1: money on the table, is it. Well, if you don't
Speaker 1: have to do it and you can make people drive
Speaker 1: down to JFK, you know, from Connecticut where I lived,
Speaker 1: or you can make them drive down and you have
Speaker 1: to do it, why do it? You know it just
Speaker 1: splits up your market? Is some part of this? Like
Speaker 1: it seems like there's a pendulum. There's been this pendulum
Speaker 1: in American commercial air over the last I don't know,
Speaker 1: twenty years or something, where first there was this period
Speaker 1: of consolidation where airlines were going bankrupt getting acquired, there
Speaker 1: was less and less competition, and now it seems like
Speaker 1: we're going back the other way. There are lots of
Speaker 1: new airlines doing things like you're doing. I mean, is
Speaker 1: that is this that story? Is this like you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the market working as intended, where people go
Speaker 1: to business and there's opportunity, and then you come and
Speaker 1: start an airline and be like, oh, there's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to fly from Westchester to Las Vegas. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: that a way of framing the story. I think it's
Speaker 1: more that, you know, kind of as the airlines got
Speaker 1: higher costs, and you know, after their bankrupt season, then
Speaker 1: they started building costs back up again. They started saying, well,
Speaker 1: we can make a lot more money if we just
Speaker 1: fly to our hubs. So if we can take everyone
Speaker 1: to our hubs and we can connect them, and if
Speaker 1: we can go up to a two hundred seed air
Speaker 1: plane instead of one hundred and thirty seed airplane, that
Speaker 1: works better. And you know what's happening today with the
Speaker 1: pilot shortage. You know, regional airlines can't hire pilots, enough
Speaker 1: pilots stuff, And there's about three hundred of those airplanes
Speaker 1: that are grounded. So cities like Richmond and Charleston and
Speaker 1: used to always have these little spokes that would go
Speaker 1: to the hubs. A lot of those are not they're
Speaker 1: canceling service to those cities. So it's a combination of
Speaker 1: the focus on the hubs not being able to fly
Speaker 1: the regional flights that has really created a really great
Speaker 1: opportunity for us. In a minute, speaking of the pilot shortage,
Speaker 1: what's going on with air travel this summer? Why is
Speaker 1: everybody suddenly warning us that flying is just going to
Speaker 1: be one problem after another. That's the end of the ads.
Speaker 1: Now we're going back to the show. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the pilot shortage and staffing more generally. I know you
Speaker 1: had to postpone launching some new routes. It seemed like
Speaker 1: kind of at the last minute recently. Is that partly
Speaker 1: because you can't hire enough people fast enough. No, it
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with that. We have plenty of
Speaker 1: people that we've hired, and it was more an issue
Speaker 1: of training and had a little bit to do with
Speaker 1: the FAA. We had a certification process for our new
Speaker 1: aircraft that was supposed to take six months. It's always
Speaker 1: taking six months. This took eight months, you know, because
Speaker 1: of COVID and all that. You know, the staffing issues
Speaker 1: at the FAA. So we ran into that two month
Speaker 1: delay and we finally just ran out of runway, had
Speaker 1: to push it back and now we're we're we're in
Speaker 1: good shape now. But you know, it was painful, and
Speaker 1: you know it's it's never gonna happen again, for sure.
Speaker 1: It's just for us. It's a training pipeline. And now
Speaker 1: we got a lot more analytics, and we brought in
Speaker 1: a whole new team, a new CEO, a new president,
Speaker 1: you know, new chief people officer, and they're you know,
Speaker 1: doing a heck of a lot better. So did you
Speaker 1: just reorganize the company a year after you started it? Yeah? Uh?
Speaker 1: What went wrong? You know, because you know, we weren't
Speaker 1: doing a good enough job of you know, anticipating and
Speaker 1: doing the analytics and making sure that you know, the
Speaker 1: communication between operations and our commercial side, making sure that
Speaker 1: it was just you know, flawless. And you know, we
Speaker 1: just can't disappoint our guests anymore. You know, we have
Speaker 1: to run. We have to be flawless on everything we
Speaker 1: can control. There's enough that we can't control, but we
Speaker 1: need to be perfect on on what we can't control.
Speaker 1: There is it happened in this broader context, right, everybody's saying,
Speaker 1: like if you could not fly the summer, don't fly
Speaker 1: this summer and there's too many people and not enough pilots.
Speaker 1: Is that not the case for you? Do you think
Speaker 1: that's not the case for anybody? Like, help me understand
Speaker 1: that sort of broader context of the way people are
Speaker 1: talking about air travel right now. I don't ever remember
Speaker 1: people talking about it quite like they are right now. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I think COVID really put a dent in
Speaker 1: the in the industry from a training perspective, because the
Speaker 1: first thing that happened was, you know, the airline's got
Speaker 1: paid fifty three billion dollars, you know, to kind of
Speaker 1: keep people on staff. But what they decided to do
Speaker 1: was to use some of that money to retire pilots,
Speaker 1: the most expensive pilots. So there was about seven thousand
Speaker 1: pilots that left. So they left the industry seven thousand.
Speaker 1: Give me, I don't have any context. What's the denominator
Speaker 1: to how many or how do I parse that number?
Speaker 1: I would guess probably at the big airlines, you know,
Speaker 1: fifty and pilots or less. So it was a big
Speaker 1: chunk of what they had. But it created this trickle
Speaker 1: that effect because you know, when you have to train someone,
Speaker 1: it takes two months to train someone for a new airplane,
Speaker 1: and then they have this initial operating experience and if
Speaker 1: you've got five or six aircraft types, you're you're really
Speaker 1: just doing a lot of training to backfield for those
Speaker 1: seven thousand and then you pull from your regional airlines,
Speaker 1: you call, you know, you go to SkyWest and you
Speaker 1: go to Republican Higher, all their pilots away and then
Speaker 1: you put them in and everyone's changing airplanes and the
Speaker 1: whole process is just is very time consuming. And you know,
Speaker 1: they just saw the demand coming back and put flights
Speaker 1: on as we did. And you know, the training is
Speaker 1: really what was the hiccup? The training is get that
Speaker 1: in a similar way to getting you, it's getting everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are there things you've tried to figure out either at
Speaker 1: Breeze or at previous airlines you've started or run that
Speaker 1: you haven't figured out yet that you're still kind of
Speaker 1: working on. Is there some sort of you know, problem
Speaker 1: you're still trying to solve that you haven't quite got
Speaker 1: right yet that you that you're returning to or you
Speaker 1: want to return to. I think you know the challenges
Speaker 1: you've got, and I'm not I haven't looked at it recently.
Speaker 1: But you have a company like Priceline that has booking
Speaker 1: dot Com and they, you know, at one time they
Speaker 1: were worth one hundred billion dollars. You go on to
Speaker 1: book a hotel and they're worth more than all the
Speaker 1: airlines combine. If you add them all up, they're worth
Speaker 1: more than one company. So well, airlines are famously a
Speaker 1: really bad business, right like you got to you gotta
Speaker 1: pay for the planes, you got to buy gas, you
Speaker 1: got all this regulation, like it's a hard business. It is,
Speaker 1: But nobody books a hotel before they book an airline ticket.
Speaker 1: They always book the airline ticket first, and so there's
Speaker 1: no reason why we can't put that together using automation
Speaker 1: to be able to give them everything and do it
Speaker 1: better than can be done if you alocrt it and
Speaker 1: pe smell it. So I think that's kind of the
Speaker 1: holy grill of being able to kind of put a
Speaker 1: concert ticket with a rental car or a transportation in
Speaker 1: a hotel, but doing it through automation, not the old
Speaker 1: tour operator style, but something where you can you know,
Speaker 1: create that and do it because I think being able
Speaker 1: to profit from that trip all the way through it
Speaker 1: as opposed to just the airfare. I think that's really
Speaker 1: kind of where we need to be. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's like you're building the business that's most essential, but
Speaker 1: the least profitable piece of the trip, right exactly, right,
Speaker 1: So we you know, we got to do we got
Speaker 1: to do better at that, and we have our database
Speaker 1: of people. So I'm trying to think, is there a
Speaker 1: model like who's come closest to that? Well, there's package
Speaker 1: companies that's you know, sell packages. But a pure ala cart,
Speaker 1: you pluy ala cart where you can just go click, click, click, click,
Speaker 1: this is what you want and you change the click
Speaker 1: and it changes the amount and you click click click,
Speaker 1: you know, you go three star, four star, five star. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but now you're just back to kayak or something, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not obvious why the airline should be at the
Speaker 1: center of that. Well, it's because we're if without us,
Speaker 1: nothing happens sort of, But like why should it be
Speaker 1: that the air airline is fixed and the hotel is variable?
Speaker 1: Like why not have them all be variable? Right? In Brazil?
Speaker 1: You know, taking my airline Brazil, I have the largest
Speaker 1: airline in Brazil. It's called a Zool And I was pushing.
Speaker 1: I hired all these people, the were airline people to
Speaker 1: help me start the airline. I started as a package
Speaker 1: tour operator. That's how I started way back. So I'm
Speaker 1: pushing them, pushing them, pushing them, pushing them. We got
Speaker 1: to do this, we got to do this, and we'll
Speaker 1: do a lot of business traffic down there. So Saturdays
Speaker 1: we have a bunch of airplanes laying around, not doing anything,
Speaker 1: and Sunday mornings we don't fly. And I said, it's perfect.
Speaker 1: We got these planes laying around. And so it took
Speaker 1: years and it took a lot of work. But today
Speaker 1: we fly on the weekends. We have like two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty flights that take off on Saturday morning and
Speaker 1: go between areas out to these leisure destinations for a
Speaker 1: week's stay that we don't fly to during the week
Speaker 1: and we're utilizing those airplanes. And that is a four
Speaker 1: hundred million dollar business that we have. So it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, and it's very profitable because we have the hotels,
Speaker 1: we have the airfare, we have all that. So people
Speaker 1: in Brazil are more accustomed to buying those types of
Speaker 1: packages than they are in the US. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's an idea that you know, I think we
Speaker 1: could use a lot of that up here. And even
Speaker 1: today we don't flyer planes a lot on Saturday, so
Speaker 1: we could do the same type of flying to Camcoon
Speaker 1: or something. You started off as doing package tours when
Speaker 1: you are basically a kid, right when you were in
Speaker 1: your early twenties, and then you went on started all
Speaker 1: these airlines worth lots of money, and that did interesting things,
Speaker 1: and basically it sounds like you're just trying to get
Speaker 1: back to booking package tours again. That's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: airline people don't think that way. They don't think about
Speaker 1: the whole revenue Pitcher. It's just not what they do.
Speaker 1: They think about operating an airline and choosing a route
Speaker 1: and pricing the route and maintaining the airplanes and training
Speaker 1: the pilots, and it's like, well, what about making money
Speaker 1: and all this other stuff. We're just busy doing this.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to kind of think on a
Speaker 1: different plane to be able to pull that off and
Speaker 1: even work guildea of it too. You know, we had
Speaker 1: anticipated doing that, but we're so folks on what we're doing.
Speaker 1: We haven't done it ourselves. We'll be back in a
Speaker 1: minute with the Lightning round. Now, let's get back to
Speaker 1: the show. I want to ask you just a few
Speaker 1: quick lightning round questions to close. What's one piece of
Speaker 1: advice you'd give to someone trying to solve a hard problem?
Speaker 1: Simplify it. My team is always like, it's not that simple.
Speaker 1: I mean, why isn't it proved to me it's not
Speaker 1: that simple. I think sometimes it looks harder than it is,
Speaker 1: but you have to put some creativity in it, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of my I think gift is to be
Speaker 1: able to look at really complicated things and simplify it.
Speaker 1: How long before departs your time do you get to
Speaker 1: the airport? My wife checks a bag, so we always
Speaker 1: try and get there at least an hour before because
Speaker 1: I don't want to get cut off on the checking
Speaker 1: the bag thing. If I didn't, it would be less
Speaker 1: than an hour. I had this, I always have this
Speaker 1: saying that if you don't miss a flight every now
Speaker 1: and then, you spend too much time in airports. So
Speaker 1: you've been fired twice that I'm aware of, And I'm curious,
Speaker 1: what's your advice for you know, the most important things
Speaker 1: say someone should do when they get fired, they should
Speaker 1: look at it as an opportunity and say, okay, what
Speaker 1: can I create? And when I got fired from Southwest,
Speaker 1: I created jet Blue. When I got demoted from the
Speaker 1: CEO to the chairman at JEB Blue, I went and
Speaker 1: started at Zul and a Zul is the most important
Speaker 1: thing I've ever done. Really. We fly eighty thousand people
Speaker 1: a day, and we have a logistics company that's on
Speaker 1: par with FedEx or ups in Brazil that can deliver
Speaker 1: to forty hundred ZIP codes. Used to be two weeks
Speaker 1: to do that, now we can do it in two days.
Speaker 1: And that's that business is huge for us. So you know,
Speaker 1: if had I never been fired at JEB Blue from
Speaker 1: the CEO job, Zoo wouldn't exist. And that is the
Speaker 1: most important thing I've done thus far. Peanuts are pretzels,
Speaker 1: Peanuts of course. More favorite airport to be stuck at
Speaker 1: with my terminal five Jeff Blue in JFK. It's got
Speaker 1: a lot of options, a great place still though you
Speaker 1: still still you still like it there? Yeah, sure, it's
Speaker 1: my baby. What's the next airline you're going to start?
Speaker 1: I think this is it. I'm good, I've done enough
Speaker 1: and I think Breeze is gonna be great, and then
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna enjoy it. David Neilman is the founder
Speaker 1: and CEO of Breeze. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo,
Speaker 1: engineered by Amanda ka Wong, and edited by Robert Smith.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and I would love to know who
Speaker 1: else you think we should book for the show. You
Speaker 1: can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. It's
Speaker 1: problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me
Speaker 1: on Twitter. I'm at Jacob Goldstein. We'll be back next
Speaker 1: week with another episode of What's Your Problem