Source: JetBlue

JetBlue shared a letter with its Crewmembers in advance of the Spirit (NYSE: SAVE) special meeting today:

Dear Crewmembers,

It’s been an active few months on our proposed acquisition of Spirit. Thanks for all your support, questions, and interest along the way. I’ve also received many messages from Spirit Team Members who are excited and rooting for us. I believe we could all work together to create a game-changing national competitor to the legacy airlines if we’re able to move forward.

The Spirit special shareholder meeting is set for tomorrow, and many of you are wondering if we will reach a conclusion to all of this. If Spirit shareholders vote down the Frontier proposal, the Spirit board will need to reconsider the very clear benefits of our offer.

For travelers, there’s so much at stake. Which airline do people really want to be the nation’s fifth largest, and which would be most effective at disrupting the Big Four? The clear answer is JetBlue. Customers would win with a bigger JetBlue – the unique combination of our beloved brand, award-winning service, and everyday low fares force the high-fare legacies to compete. A Frontier-Spirit tie-up is a missed opportunity for increased competition and denies Customers an attractive alternative to bare-bones travel.

In addition, folding Spirit into JetBlue would turbocharge our expansion. We would get more aircraft, more gates and airport space, more flights, and more Crewmembers – making our brand and products more relevant to more Customers across the country. This growth would be great for JetBlue Crewmembers too as a bigger JetBlue offers more career opportunities.

From the beginning, the Spirit board has not run a fair process and they’ve said many things about us that are blatantly false. They have deep ties to Frontier’s owner, and they have always believed a Frontier-Spirit merger was inevitable. Some Spirit shareholders have indicated to us that they have doubts about the Spirit board too, and this gives us confidence that they will vote down the Frontier merger. Whatever the outcome tomorrow, I’m proud that our team went after this opportunity and put forward our best effort.

Our founders started JetBlue in 2000 with a mission to bring humanity back to air travel. No one thought an upstart, low-cost airline with a bold mission and live TV onboard would ever work. But it did. JetBlue proved the skeptics wrong, and ever since, we’ve made a measurable impact as a competitive force for good. With or without Spirit, our future is bright and at the core of our business we have a strong organic plan that will help us win in this changing world. We will deliver continued, profitable growth as we emerge from the pandemic, backed by a strong Airbus order book, a customer experience that no airline can match, a challenging but highly valuable geography, and – most importantly – 23,000 of the industry’s best Crewmembers.

Thanks again for all you’re doing this summer to support our airline and each other.

Robin Hayes
Chief Executive Officer