Low-cost N.Y.-Hub air fares reappear

In a return to super-cheap Boston-to-New York air fares that haven't regularly been seen in 20 years, JetBlue Airways Inc. said yesterday it will start offering a round-trip ticket for as low as $69.

Using 100-seat planes, JetBlue will launch its Boston-to-New York route on Nov. 8 with eight daily round trips and expand to 10 round trips by late December. The carrier, which started selling the tickets yesterday, will fly to John F. Kennedy International Airport with introductory fares of $25 each way on trips booked by Oct. 20. Prices then rise to between $40 and $120 each way. Including taxes and fees, round-trip fares will run from a low of $69 to a high of $259. That's a lot cheaper than the typical Boston-to-New York flight which can cost nearly $300 to more than $550 round trip.

Last night, at least one competitor, American Airlines, was also offering a $25 one-way fare from Boston to New York's LaGuardia Airport.

In recent years, air travel between Boston and New York has dropped to roughly half the levels of the early 1980s, including a steep falloff after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Analysts cite a wide range of factors, including ultralow-cost Chinatown-to-Chinatown buses, Amtrak's high-speed Acela train, Southwest Airlines Co. service from Warwick, R.I., to Islip, N.Y., on Long Island, and a nationwide drop in short-range business trips after increased security measures turned many one-hour flights into two-hour procedures.

One other huge factor: the demise of People Express, New York Air, and other low-cost shuttles of the 1980s. Today passengers have few alternatives to the Delta Air Lines Inc. and US Airways Inc. Boston-to-New York shuttles, whose fares discourage many potential travelers from going by plane.

From a peak of nearly 4 million in 1984, air traffic between Boston and the three New York airports dwindled to 2.1 million in 1991, rose to over 2.5 million in 2000 on the strength of a booming economy, but had fallen back to under 1.6 million as of 2003, according to the latest data available from BACK Aviation Solutions, a New Haven aviation consulting firm.

''What's interesting about what JetBlue is doing is that it's clear you can stimulate traffic demand in that market with lower fares," said Dan Kasper, an aviation industry consultant with LECG LLC in Cambridge who has performed several studies of Boston-New York air shuttles for airlines.

In 1984, New York Air and Eastern Airlines regularly charged as little as $25 round trip for off-peak travel, which made weekend or even overnight trips to New York affordable for many travelers and encouraged hundreds of thousands more people to fly.

Because JFK is considerably farther from Wall Street and midtown Manhattan than LaGuardia Airport, which Delta and US Airways use, Kasper said he expects much of the traffic JetBlue attracts will be people who now don't fly to New York who are attracted by a cheap fare, not business travelers defecting from the mainline shuttles.

''There's a chance that it will be largely expanding the pie," Kasper said. But he predicted Delta and US Airways ''will be watching the bookings very carefully" and determining if they need to cut fares in response.

Executives at the dominant airlines on the Boston-New York route said it's too early to consider fare cuts to match JetBlue and as of now they don't see the upstart carrier eating into their business. Delta spokeswoman Chris Kelly said Delta's hourly shuttle is ''the most popular business and leisure shuttle product in the Washington, D.C.-New York-Boston market, and we are confident it will remain so." Delta bought the original Pan Am Shuttle business in the 1990s.

At US Airways, which now operates the shuttle operation that was originally run by Eastern and later briefly by New York developer Donald J. Trump as the Trump Shuttle, spokesman David Castelveter said: ''We think we provide superior service, and hourly."

Several air travelers interviewed at Logan said they would welcome a competitive alternative. JetBlue first came to Logan in January 2004. The New York-based airline currently flies to nine cities from Logan, including Fort Myers, Fla., Las Vegas, and Oakland, Calif. The carrier is known for combining low fares with high-class touches like leather seats and personal television screens on the back of every seat. Even Governor Mitt Romney praised the airline's decision to start offering lower-cost service, saying in a statement: ''I look forward to watching JetBlue grow further still at Logan."

JetBlue plans to fly roughly every 90 minutes to two hours on the Boston-New York route between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. starting Nov. 8. It will add a ninth flight Nov. 22 and a tenth Dec. 20, with more flights likely next year as it receives more Embraer 190 airplanes from the Brazilian-US manufacturing consortium that makes the planes.

''It sounds like a great deal, as long as the frequency is there," said Frank Noyes, a sales executive from Sudbury who was preparing to board the Delta Shuttle yesterday for a weekly trip to New York. ''At those fares it would also be nice to have on weekends for family and personal travel."

Maria Dominguez, a Manhattan businesswoman who was getting on the US Airways Shuttle, said, ''It's great. Competition is terrific." Along with many other travelers, Dominguez said she has usually had a much better experience on JetBlue than other airlines, and would be attracted to using the airline for Boston-New York service.

But Frank Schuler, a computer systems engineer from Wakefield, said his first question about JetBlue would be: ''Are they flying out of Logan? It's all about avoiding Logan these days for me. It'd be much more appealing for me to go to Hanscom or Manchester," Schuler said, referring to Hanscom Field in Lexington and the New Hampshire airport.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.