In 2013 JetBlue introduced a way for families to earn award flights faster.
With JetBlue Family Pooling, families (2 adults and up to 5 children) can combine points in one account which can be used to book award flights or vacation packages.
The Michael W Travels family has enjoyed the benefits of family pooling at times over the past few years. However, I just came across one problem which could probably be fixed relatively easily.
Earlier in the year we took a quick trip to St Lucia, flying there with JetBlue. During the flight it was impossible to enjoy a movie because my headphone jack was broken. Thanks to JetBlue FlyFi I contacted @Jetblue through Twitter in a direct message during the flight.
After explaining the problem, we were each issued a $15 credit which went into a travel bank. Kim, Lucas and I each got a credit which are issued individually, not as one combined amount.
Recently I was looking into some short trip ideas. I found an award flight which seemed to be a solid deal so I put in the details to book online. When I got to the payment page (for the taxes) I saw the option to pay with the travel bank.
Here is the problem.
I was hoping that when I clicked the travel bank drop down button I’d see all of our names to choose from. Sadly, this was not the case- only my name along with the $15 credit showed.
This means that if I went ahead with the online booking, I would’ve had to pay a little over $18. While $18 isn’t a large amount of money, why would I want to pay it if each of us have a credit?
I decided to call JetBlue and see if they could help. I explained the situation and the rep said that using each travel bank was no problem. To make a long story short let’s just say that the rep was able to apply our travel banks so I owed no money, however the call took a relatively long time which was definitely annoying.
My proposed solution.
Since JetBlue Family Pooling already exists why can’t the airline allow all travel banks to show up when you’re booking a flight for the family? JetBlue should have the dropdown for the travel bank list the names of each family member who is listed on the booking.
While I’m no techie, I can’t imagine that this would be a hard thing to have done.
And if my simple idea is too hard to implement, why can’t Jet Blue have Travel Bank Family Pooling?
The JetBlue TravelBank is actually managed on a completely different system (Sabre, the same system that manages the flight bookings for JetBlue and many other airlines).
Motti- Interesting… So it wouldn’t be simple to just add the travel banks of all family pooling members to a booking then?