How I Nearly Lost My JetBlue Points Booking
TLDR: A website glitch almost prevented a JetBlue points booking. A helpful supervisor resolved the issue over the phone. If online award booking fails, call and escalate to a supervisor to fix it.
How I Nearly Lost My JetBlue Points Booking
The Plan: Boston to JFK to Frankfurt
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They say that if you’re on the East Coast, JetBlue is king—free Wi-Fi, unlimited snacks, and roomy seats. But even JetBlue’s vaunted award chart can trip you up: when I tried to transform 13,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points from my Chase Sapphire Reserve® into two 6,500-point Boston→JFK tickets, the website glitched and nearly stole my seats.
Here’s how a savvy supervisor got me back on track.
The Plan: Boston to JFK to Frankfurt
Since I have a Singapore Airlines business class flight this summer departing from JFK, I needed to find a way to get to New York from Boston. After exploring tools such as pointsyeah.com, roame.travel, and seats.aero (websites dedicated to finding, valuing, and booking award flights with miles from various airline programs), I found a flight from Boston to JFK with JetBlue at 6,500 points one way.
I also had the option of booking a 8,300 point Blue fare. I decided against this because I knew I was not going to make any further changes to my flight and was comfortable not picking a seat (also, wanted to be frugal with my points). Furthermore, when it comes to bags, Blue fares have the same rules as Blue Basic fares. You get one personal item and a carry-on bag.
Before booking this flight, I made sure to check cash prices for similar flights. The cheapest I found was $99, making the points flight a great deal!