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Or, how to become a global airline without flying your own jumbo jets

The folks over at JetBlue seem to have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of providing a global service…without the expense of becoming a global airline.

This time last year, the New York-based airline was announcing its partnership with South African Airways, which enabled JetBlue customers to connect via SAA to some 40 destinations on the Mother Continent, a connection JetBlue has upgraded since.

A year later and JetBlue is doing it again, this time aiming toward Europe.

They’ve announced a new partnership with Icelandair, giving JetBlue passengers the ability to book through to Scandinavia and the European continent in much the same way they can access Africa via SAA.

You can check out the details in this Icelandair press release here.

With Germany’s Lufthansa and Ireland’s Aer Lingus already in the house, this gives JetBlue three European airline partners. The addition of Icelandair gives them coverage via European airlines of all but southern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Their total roster of partner airlines is now six, including American Airlines and Cape Air, a small independent carrier covering New England and the Caribbean.

At this rate, they may soon be the smallest airline to have its own global air alliance.

A lot of folks have never heard of Icelandair, but as you’ll note in their press release, they’ve been around awhile. Back in the days before deregulation in the United States and before the airlines got slammed by high fuel prices, Icelandair was almost like a guerrilla airline, operating under the radar of their much larger and better known competitors.

They were always favored by a handful of super-savvy travelers who knew how to find cheap — and sometimes astonishingly cheap — Icelandair airfares from the East Coast to Europe, as well as very knowledgeable travel agents who knew how to work the system.

In the decades since, plenty of airlines have come and gone, but Icelandair is still going. Now JetBlue is hooking up with them to extend their reach into Europe.

If you’re already a fan of jetBlue, this is definitely a good thing. And if you’re never flown JetBlue before, you now have another reason to give it some thought.

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