Last week, JetBlue held a week long auction on eBay to sell over 300 airline tickets and vacation packages. All of the travel needs to be completed by October 6th, so these auctions provided an opportunity for JetBlue to quickly sell off unsold seats and packages. Prices started between five and ten cents, which helped to quickly drive up the share of JetBlue’s traffic going to eBay to 7% last week, up from 0.58%.

On Monday, Sept 8th, the first day of the auctions, there was a big jump where 22% of JetBlue’s traffic visited eBay immediately after JetBlue.com. The JetBlue/eBay auctions provided a good acquisition opportunity to attract customers during a time when ticket sales tend to be sluggish for the airline industry – among the JetBlue visitors that visited eBay, 84% were new, meaning they had not visited JetBlue in the past 30 days. The prospects of scoring some cheap plane tickets also resulted in an overall increase of new visitors to JetBlue.com last week, reaching 55%, up from 48% the week prior.