JetBlue's Surprise: Florida, Florida, Florida

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- After paying $72 million for eight slot pairs at congested LaGuardia Airport, JetBlue(JBLU) is unexpectedly committing the slots to five Florida destinations.

Florida routes are generally considered to be low-yield routes flown for leisure travelers, who aren't overly choosy as long as they can get low fares. Typically, airlines use high-value, limited access airports such as LaGuardia for markets (such as Boston and Chicago) where business travelers want frequent service and are willing to pay for it.

JetBlue plans to use valuable LaGuardia slots to fly leisure routes to Florida, rather than higher-yield business routes.

JetBlue said Monday that, starting June 11, it will add three LaGuardia destinations: Fort Myers, Sarasota and Tampa (twice daily). Additionally, it will add additional flights to Fort Lauderdale, Orlando (twice daily) and West Palm Beach. The carrier already serves all six destinations from Kennedy International Airport. Florida is "where we see the most opportunity and demand," JetBlue spokesman Bryan Baldwin says.

The slots became available only because the U.S. Department of Transportation demanded that Delta(DAL) and US Airways(LCC) auction off slots at La Guardia and Washington Reagan National Airport to low-fare carriers in return for approval of a deal in which they traded dozens of slots at the two airports, making Delta bigger at LaGuardia and US Airways bigger at National.

Few expected JetBlue's new slots to serve the snowbirds.

"It doesn't make a lot of sense to me," aviation consultant Bob Mann says. "JetBlue has a surplus of Florida capacity right now, and I can't believe that Florida is the highest and best use of their capacity."

Avondale Partners airline analyst Bob McAdoo says the explanation may be that for JetBlue, Kennedy slots have more value than LaGuardia slots because JetBlue operates a Kennedy hub and is leveraging that into partnerships with a wide assortment of carriers. Attaching less value to LaGuardia slots is counterintuitive, however. As former Pan Am and Eastern executive Marty Shugrue used to say, "You can make money flying from LaGuardia to anywhere."