Closing out my TrueBlue account

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with JetBlue. I love their on-board product and I consider their JFK terminal to be perhaps the best domestic air service terminal in the United States. At the same time, however, I always found their TrueBlue program a bit lacking. Sitting on a collection of 43 points, some of which were expiring in a couple weeks, I was pretty convinced that I was actually never going to get to redeem a reward despite flying with them off and on for many years.

One nice advantage the program has, however, is the availability of one-way rewards. I’ve got an upcoming trip that currently purchased tickets will dump me off in Puerto Rico at the end of and I still need to get home. Poking around I can find one-way flights home in the $170-250 range. Not horrible, but I’d rather not spend the cash if I don’t have to. Time to make a phone call.

Lucky for me the route I’m looking at had reward availability on the exact date I wanted. Ten minutes on the phone later and I had my ticket booked. I did have to convert some of my new TrueBlue2 points to old TrueBlue points so that I had enough to book the reward, but that was a trivial process on the website. And I was dreading the phone call to book the award – one cannot book or even see inventory for the old rewards online anymore and hold times have been pretty atrocious since the new program launched – but even the hold time was reasonable this morning (< 5 minutes). As a minor aside, I briefly had a means to search award availability online but the carrier has apparently removed it from the GDSes. Sucks.

And so, nearly seven years after I joined the TrueBlue program and started collecting points, I finally had enough to redeem for an award and I even managed to find the flights and dates I wanted. Sure, it took a bit longer than I would have preferred, but I got it done.

And now my TrueBlue account is at zero. Time to focus on TrueBlue2 – and the balance here is above zero and growing nicely – and getting some value from that program. Shouldn’t be nearly as hard as with the old program.

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