Category Archives: New Orleans

Hotel Review: Astor Crowne Plaza- New Orleans

Hotel Review, New Orleans, ,
a street with cars and buildings
photo credit: Astor Crowne Plaza

While planning our trip to New Orleans, I knew that I wanted to stay in the French Quarter or as close as possible without breaking the bank. Before I even started to look for a hotel, I came across a tweet by Ric Garrido of the Loyalty Traveler blog which helped make my decision very easy.
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The tweet was for a post Priority Club Rewards Deep Discounts. Priority Club was adjusting their hotel award rates. Hotels going for 35,000- 40,000 points were currently available for 15,000 points per night.
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I did a quick search and booked a room at the Astor Crowne Plaza located in the French Quarter on Bourbon Street.
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jetBlue Confuses Me

Cancelled, Flights, JetBlue, New Orleans
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Back in December I wrote about the jetBlue TrueBlue program. The post was about how you need to Be Careful With Your Points. The program has a very limited way to keep your account active. You can only extend the expiration date by earning points by flying or using a jetBlue Amex card.

When I learned about this I was pretty surprised. Most airline and hotel programs allow you to extend your expiration by dining or shopping at an online portal. JetBlue seemed to be pretty customer- unfriendly if you ask me.

Just before my TrueBlue points were about to expire in December, I booked Kim and I on a one way flight from New Orleans to New York for May 16. (I booked a flight from NY on Southwest)

I had posted my jetBlue- Be Careful information to frequent flyer site Flyertalk. The post got a good amount of views and a bunch of comments. There hadn’t been any comments on the post in about a month until I noticed a new one last night.
On April 28, Flyertalk member AMflier wrote:

You need to fly before the expiration date. Months before my points expired I booked a flight that departed 2 weeks after the expiration date. I thought I was safe. They deleted the points. Several calls and visits to the customer service desk didn’t get the points reinstated. 

AMflier’s comment got me thinking that I better check my jetBlue account. I wasn’t sure if he meant that they cancelled his flight or just took away his remaining points.

I logged in saw some pretty confusing information. 
Check out the image below:

a screenshot of a flight schedule

I saw that our flight status was confirmed but below that it stated in red: This itinerary has been cancelled.

I immediately called up jetBlue customer service. After a brief hold I explained the situation to the representative. She looked up my details and told me that the flight had changed. The flight would be arriving back in NY a minute early (1:39 instead of 1:40) so the system shows this as a cancelled flight! 

Now I was even more confused. What did this mean? Were we on the new flight or not. We certainly did not mind returning home a full minute earlier than the original flight. It also wasn’t like jetBlue even contacted us to let us know about this important change.

I was assured that we were still booked on our flight home from New Orleans but the rep could not explain why the website showed our itinerary as cancelled. I asked if this happens a lot and if she gets lots of calls about this. She said that she gets calls like this a few times per week.

Hopefully we’ll make it home from New Orleans with jetBlue on May 16. I think that I’ll call one more time to confirm my reservation later in the week!