Air Baltic Looks to JetBlue Founder David Neeleman for Guidance

Almost two decades ago, Martin Gauss, leader of a small German airline, emailed David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways. Gauss admired Neeelman's plucky startup, and wanted to learn what made JetBlue so popular. Neeelman invited him to New York, and the two executives discussed how Neeleman focused on customer satisfaction by offering goodies like free potato chips, while investing in technology, including live television. Europe was still dominated by established players, many of which couldn't — or wouldn't — innovate, even as low-cost competition threatened their margins. "It was a revolution for me, coming from Europe," Gauss said. "It was really cool. All the blue chips? Can you imagine? And they had a boarding pass that was coming out of a printer. It was all the little things." Gauss returned to Germany and wrote a restructuring plan for his airline, called dba. It no longer exists — Air Berlin bought it in 2006 — but for the past seven years, Gauss has brought pieces of JetBlue's ethos to Latvia, where he is CEO of Air Baltic. Like JetBlue in the early 2002s, Air Baltic is a scrappy underdog trying to keep pace with larger competition. It's not a startup — it began flying 23 years ago — but it still receives considerable attention for being more innovative and perhaps more passenger friendly than Europe's largest airlines. Among other things, it claims it was the first airline in the world to accept bitcoin as payment. "We are not copying anything from JetBlue, but my thinking of running an airline goes in this direction," Gauss said in an interview last month at the Aviation Festival in London, an industry conference. "If you are not making the customers happy, sooner or later you're not going to be successful." No one will confuse Air B