JetBlue’s large Fort Lauderdale focus city, once promised to rival American’s hub in nearby Miami is a casualty of the victorious DOJ lawsuit to block the JetBlue-Spirit merger.

JetBlue will stop flying from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta, Austin, Bogota, Lima, Nashville, Newburgh, New Orleans, Quito and Salt Lake City this summer. To offset this, JetBlue will add additional frequencies from Fort Lauderdale to Cancun, San Juan, New York and Boston. But what this means is that JetBlue’s FLL hub will have less dots to connect to even if the frequencies are increased on more successful routes.

Additionally, the airline will scrap Orlando-Salt Lake City, Tampa-Aguadilla and Miami-Los Angeles flights. The later cut, is particularly alarming given JetBlue’s efforts to grow both Los Angeles and Miami.

I am told to expect further changes to JetBlue’s network as the airline struggles financially.

JetBlue remains committed to having a large operation in both Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, but needed Spirit’s additional planes/pilots as well as their more built-out domestic network to make that possible. Ironically enough, these moves benefit Spirit directly. Spirit will be the only airline remaining on the Fort Lauderdale-Lima and Quito routes as well as one of only two on Fort Lauderdale-Austin/Bogota/New Orleans.

Spirit as well has made major network cuts since DOJ prevailed in blocking the merger with JetBlue, but those cuts have been largely focused on Las Vegas and Orlando. JetBlue’s cuts were largely focused on Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles. In addition, Spirit appears poised to grow its operations in Atlanta, Boston and New York as well as trying to consolidate a dominant position in Fort Lauderdale with the scaling down by both Southwest and JetBlue at that airport.