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?