MANCHESTER, NH – JetBlue is taxiing down the runway about to take off into what it hopes is a new era bright with Florida sunshine and fueled in part by the demise of Spirit Airlines earlier this month, but Manchester’s airport won’t be along for the trip.
The New York-based airline is terminating service out of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport less than two years after it began as it refocuses its resources on its already lucrative Fort Lauderdale routes, which got a bigger boost this month after Spirit went out of business.
The news that the airline will leave MHT came just 18 months, and with a lot less fanfare, than when JetBlue’s relationship with MHT began full of promise and excitement in January 2025.
Manchester-Boston Regional Airport announced the termination of JetBlue service on its Facebook page Thursday. The airline’s last flight out of the airport is scheduled for July 8.
“JetBlue shared that they have to ‘make a tough call as to how to best support national connectivity in a time of capacity crisis,’” MHT’s post said. “We know the community will also be disappointed to hear this news. However, we will continue to seek new carriers and routes and hope to welcome JetBlue back to MHT in the future.”
JetBlue said it is “making targeted schedule adjustments to a small number of underperforming routes and redeploying aircraft to support growth on routes with stronger customer demand,” in a statement to the media after MHT’s announcement went public.
JetBlue this year had decided to focus on its growth at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood airport, which was up 23% last quarter over the first quarter of 2025, representing a 5% increase in revenue for the airline, according to its 2026-Q1 earnings report. It was the airlines highest point of RASM – revenue according to seat miles – and capacity growth in 2025.
At the same time, when the first-quarter report was written, fuel costs were up 26% and rising – an unexpected increase caused by the Iran war, and JetBlue’s operating losses had increased 28.5% from this time last year.
A short-term goal cited in the report was to “focus on implementing levers to offset impact of fuel volatility, including yield optimization, capacity reductions and incremental cost savings.”
Spirit, which also provided lower-cost routes to Florida, went out of business May 2, giving JetBlue’s plans a boost. On May 6, JetBlue announced that it was adding 11 new destinations from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and increasing flights on existing routes.
There are only so many airplanes available, and when new higher-yield routes are added, the ones that aren’t making money for an airline have to go.
The MHT announcement that service in Manchester was ending came hours after JetBlue’s annual shareholder’s meeting Thursday.
JetBlue service out of Manchester took off in January 2025 with a lot more fanfare than it ended last week. The airline began flying out of MHT in January 2025, an announcement accompanied by a ribbon cutting attended by Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais, and a March Florida-themed party at the base of Loon Mountain.
MHT officials last week said they have “worked diligently to promote JetBlue service,” including “providing air service incentives, a substantial marketing budget, and conducting various promotional activities to create awareness.
“Unfortunately, those efforts were not enough to overcome their ongoing business challenges, which have only been exacerbated by the recent spike in jet fuel prices,” the statement said.
“JetBlue remains deeply committed to New England, including our Boston focus city and the many communities we continue to serve across the region,” the company said in its statement.
Initially, JetBlue offered daily year-round flights out of Manchester to Orlando, Florida, and winter seasonal service to Fort Myers and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood. Those routes were frequently adjusted, with the nonstop Orlando flight the one mainstay through 2025.
In June, JetBlue began offering nonstop service to JFK Airport in New York at a temporary sale price of $49, another seasonal route that ended Oct. 1.
More than 1.38 million passengers flew in and out of MHT in 2025, the highest number since 2019, and an 8.7% increase in passenger activity over 2024. Despite that, JetBlue’s load factor – the number of passengers vs. seating capacity – for its routes out of MHT was lower than average, according to industry analysts.
While overall JetBlue numbers aren’t available, the lowest load factor across all of JetBlue’s routes airline-wide was the MHT to JFK airport in New York flight, which had a 29.2% load capacity, an average 47 passengers per flight on a 162-seat Airbus A320, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics, analyzed by Simply Flying.
Aside from Manchester and Boston, JetBlue operates out of seven other New England airports, including Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Worcester, Massachusetts; Portland and Presque Isle, Maine; Hartford, Connecticut; and Providence, Rhode Island. Most have limited and seasonal routes.
The termination of JetBlue service is the second blow in a one-two punch for MHT, coming three months after budget airline Avelo, which also had service to Florida, paused its operations at the airport. A year ago, Spirit also officially pulled out of the airport after pausing operations in 2024.
CEO Joanna Geraghty, in an interview on WBUR in Boston, said the expansion of service from Fort Lauderdale is the airline “continuing to diversify the network.”
The interview aired the same day that MHT announced the service termination, and was filmed two days earlier, but the topic of service cuts didn’t come up, though the airlines challenges and service expansion did.
“We’re so concentrated in the Northeast, and we’re going to continue to be a big carrier in Boston, so that’s not changing, but we need to expand beyond the Northeast so we can gain scale in a market that allows us to compete more effectively against the larger carriers,” Gerraghty said.
The airline is adding member lounges at some airports, including Logan, in Boston, which is its New England hub and is expected to absorb a lot of the Manchester business.
JetBlue said it will contact passengers who’ve already booked flights out of Manchester after July 8 to help them with other arrangements.
Passengers flying out of Manchester can still find service to Florida. Southwest offers year-round nonstop flights to Orlando and seasonal service to Tampa, and Breeze has nonstop flights to Fort Myers as well as “Breeze Thru” flights to Tampa and Orlando. Also operating out of MHT are American Airlines, Breeze and United.