5 years of Breeze: things I got wrong

In the wee hours of the morning on May 21, 2021, our tiny team huddled around a table and pushed a few buttons to launch Breeze Airways’ first route network, our app, and our website.

Breeze Airways sales launch command center on May 21, 2021
I’m second from right.

We made ourselves several promises on sales launch day about how our airline would do things differently. We definitely didn’t get these ones right.

We will only sell nonstop itineraries

Connecting flights were not part of Breeze’s original route announcement, nor were direct flights ("one stop, no plane change"). Our tech team believed that—like some other airlines in the United States—we’d never sell anything other than nonstop flights.

In January 2022, we began selling our direct itineraries. One thing we overlooked: we assumed passengers would always have the same seat on both legs. We found out that full flights might cause passengers to have to change seats during the quick stop.

We will always operate on time

Our initial app version had no way to display flight delays. When rolling thunderstorms hovered over Tampa a few days after our first flight, we had to string together a janky fix.

Version 1.0 of our app… moments before we published it.

Worse still, our app stopped displaying boarding passes immediately after the scheduled time of departure. I felt the pain myself waiting alongside a boarding area full of customers in Charleston waiting for the weather to improve in Tampa. While our captain stood in front of the crowd and provided updates, we scrambled to identify the code and get a fix live then and there.

The band-aid was ugly: we decided to show boarding passes for 3 extra hours. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough that we leaned on that imperfect solution for over a year.

Everyone must create an account to buy a ticket

We studied how apps outside the airline industry handled customer accounts. Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood, Instagram, and more all required account creation, and we decided we’d do the same and require every customer to create an account. We believed that ultimately required accounts would make it easier to book and manage a reservation.

In September 2024, we created a login-free path for travel agents making corporate and government reservations. Our consumer app and site still require most people to create accounts, but some clever individuals have also found ways around that.

Everyone will love using social login

If we were going to require everyone to sign up for an account, we thought we could make life easy by allowing account creation with Apple, Google, and Facebook social identities.

This. is. a. spectacularly. bad. idea.

Importing fields like a customer’s name from their Facebook profile is… problematic. Someone might use a nickname or a completely different persona on their social account. Thousands of reservations got completed with details that didn’t match a customer’s ID. This led to people getting held back at airport security checkpoints and needing immediate name changes. Some unlucky ones missed their flights.

We also found out how many people create multiple accounts. Perhaps they use Facebook or Google on their computer when purchasing their flight, and then on their phone they log in with their Apple ID. I’ve sat next to customers who complained that the app wouldn’t show their flight details, only to discover their reservation was tied to a different account.
We’re figuring out how to get ourselves out of this pickle.

We will never participate in a Global Distribution System (GDS)

I remember a travel agent in New Orleans giving me an earful in June 2021 about how impossibly hard it was for her to book Breeze and that we had to jump into the GDS as quickly as possible. We were certain we’d never do that. Why would a new airline saddle themselves with systems developed in the 1960s and 70s?

In February 2025, we joined Amadeus GDS and in the summer launched our partnership with Travelport.

What changed our minds? It was an accumulation of dozens of small things. For instance, we noticed that our route network offers hundreds of nonstop flights between cities with large federal government facilities, like Norfolk, Virginia, and Jacksonville, Florida. Most travel agencies making reservations for the federal government still use a GDS.

Our participation in these systems is less than 1% of our business, but it makes a huge difference to the people who rely on it.

To our future broken promises 🥂

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved since we pushed those buttons and opened our doors to millions of travelers in the last five years. We’ve done right by our customers and by ourselves by reconsidering our strong opinions and figuring out how to make it work for everyone.

In the past year, several new things we told ourselves we’d never do keep tiptoeing toward us.

Keep an eye out.
We’re nimble.

Matt in his Breeze Launch Team (“the B.L.T.”) t-shirt