JetBlue shares down 4.35% following Steven Slater incident
Trade The Trend reports JetBlue shares are trading 4.35% lower at $6.15. This depite the 8.3 % rise in July Traffic, compared to the same month last year.
The airline said that it flew 2.76 billion revenue passenger miles last month. JetBlue figured on recent news when a JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater stormed out of a plane and down an emergency chute after getting in an altercation with a passenger on Monday. The incident was widely covered by the media.
New York Times noted that JetBlue remained silent twenty-four hours since the incident was first reported. The paper's advertising columnist Stuart Elliot wrote "the publicity generated by the incident has been enormous, offering JetBlue a chance to take advantage of the attention to communicate in unique ways with potential and current customers."
Elliot observed that "for the first 48 hours, JetBlue said nothing about the matter." He further wrote that JetBlue's silence is "an unusual course of action - or inaction - for a company known for skillfully cultivating the public through social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter."
Newspapers followed the development of the story including the arrest of Slater.
According to reports, the problem started before takeoff in Pittsburgh when a woman verbally abused the flight attendant when he tried to intervene in the passengers argument with another passenger over space in an overhead luggage bin.
Slater's lawyer said that Slater acted in part out of frustration with the chaos of air travel and was under stress due to a family member's health issues.