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By EDWARD D. MURPHY, Staff Writer Wednesday, February 21, 2007

JetBlue Airways outlined a passenger bill of rights Tuesday to compensate and mollify angry customers who endured strandings or long delays when the company canceled flights to Portland and several other cities this past weekend.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer David Neeleman described the crisis as a "huge bump in the road" but said in a conference call with reporters that JetBlue would move past it.

He said the bill of rights describes how the airline will compensate passengers for canceled or delayed flights. For instance, if a flight is canceled within 12 hours of its intended departure time and the cancellation is JetBlue's fault, passengers will get a full refund or voucher, plus another voucher for the amount the passenger paid for the original round-trip.

JetBlue will also offer vouchers for delays, with the amount determined by the length of the delay.

The compensation, which is retroactive to last week, is not intended for delays caused by the weather. JetBlue's problems last weekend were created by its inability to cope with the disruption caused by the ice storm, rather than the storm itself.

The airline ended up with hundreds of crew members and dozens of planes out of place and dropped nearly 1,100 of its 3,400 scheduled flights on Saturday, Sunday and Monday to get the system back in shape. Portland was one of 11 cities where all flights were canceled.

Neeleman said cities served only by JetBlue's smaller, 100-seat regional jets had no service so the airline could concentrate on getting crews into the airline's larger 150-seat Airbuses.

"That's what we really felt worst about," Neeleman said of the cities where JetBlue dropped all flights. "We're going to really have to work to win back those customers."

Marcia Makley of Boca Raton, Fla., is one of them.

Trying to reach Maine, Makley and her three daughters flew JetBlue to New York's JFK airport Friday afternoon and waited for a connection to Portland until nearly 3 a.m. Saturday morning. The airline gave them a voucher for a hotel that proved to be full, and the family spent $175 on cab fare trying to get to a car-rental agency.

They finally got to Maine when a friend from Rockport drove down to Connecticut to pick them up. The family visited Wal-Mart to buy something to wear, since their luggage was still somewhere in the airport in New York.

"There were thousands of people and mounds of luggage," said Makley, who returned to Florida on JetBlue Tuesday. "I flew them (JetBlue) so many times and I said, "You guys, I am so shocked.' "

The aftermath of the storm will cost JetBlue about $10 million for the refunds, another $16 million for credit vouchers and about $4 million in additional expenses to move crews around, charter aircraft and other costs incurred over the weekend, Neeleman said.

In addition, Neeleman said the company will train its office workers to help out at JFK if there's a similar event and is also strengthening its system for keeping track of and communicating with crew members when flight schedules are disrupted. JetBlue is also changing its work rules for reservation agents that will require them to work longer in an emergency to help customers change reservations or make alternative travel plans.

"It's been a pretty somber week for us and a week of lessons learned," he said. "We made a mistake. We should have acted quicker. We should have had a contingency plan."

At the same time, Neeleman suggested that a national "Passengers' Bill of Rights," proposed Tuesday by Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., won't work.

The bill would require airlines to give passengers the option of leaving the plane after it's been held on the ground for more than three hours and provide passengers with food, water and access to restrooms during lengthy delays.

Neeleman said customers are most concerned with getting to their destination and aren't going to want pilots to give up a plane's space in line to return to the terminal and let some people off.

"If I had a flight that was out there for 3 hours and 23 minutes and I was next in line to take off and Congress told me I have to take this plane back and cancel the flight, I would have a riot on that plane," he said.

Bill Mitchell, president of Hurley Travel Experts in Portland, said JetBlue could have moved faster to offer compensation for passengers stranded over the weekend, but he predicted that customers who were not scheduled to fly JetBlue in the past few days will likely pay more attention to the airline's low fares than the past week's chaos.

"They have to recognize the turmoil they sent the travelers in over the weekend and Monday," said Mitchell, whose business flight to Florida was canceled by JetBlue. "I think people are very forgiving -- not the people who got canceled, but those who got on the plane today."