The Initial Call

I was expecting to be on hold forever. The JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet pass was all over the news and I was buying it on the first day of the offer. I didn’t even have to wait the slimmest second, though. They must have beefed up manpower for ticket. I was patched through to an agent immediately and was done with the whole purchase on the inside of ten minutes. JetBlue has won all kinds of praise for its Utah-based contact center. It lets its agents work from home, so they can work fairly comfortably and happily and consequently offer better service. I tell you, though; the agent must have been a hardened veteran by the time she got to my call. She had her All-You-Can-Jet spiel down to an art, gathering my info in graceful, ergonomic fashion and making me aware of the restrictions that came with the pass before processing my order with practiced, acrobatic ease.

I must say, throughout the entire process (despite a couple of screw ups on JetBlue’s part) I have been mightily impressed by the JetBlue agents. This first agent actually worked it me through the process so fast I had to say, “You’ve got this thing pat. Have you been selling a lot of passes?”

“All day,” she said. “You have no idea.”

When I bought the ticket, I didn’t book any flights. The trip, which was to be a series of here-to-there’s, from airport to airport could go out like a string of Christmas lights if one leg fell through. If, for instance, I couldn’t make it to Chicago for some reason, I wouldn’t be able to catch my flight to Los Angeles, which means I wouldn’t be able to make the next flight and so on and so on, and I’d get slapped with at least a small handful of the missed flight fees if I didn’t cancel on time. Rather than missing any and chancing the wrath of a jilted JetBlue, I decided sure up commitments from all the friends I intended to stay with before booking the corresponding flights.

In a lot of ways, what followed was one of the most fun parts of my adventure across America. The days when I was plotting out my route, there was an intense feeling of freedom and possibility. Really, I could pretty much go anywhere inside of the continental United States whenever I wanted to. Sitting there with JetBlue’s map, I entertained fantasies of seeing The Preservation Hall Jazz Band one night in New Orleans and waking up Houston to see the Hot Club of Cowtown the next. It didn’t end up working out that way. I had a thesis to write and, consequently, I decided to spend around five days in each place to get a firm toehold in the work between stops. When I really sat down to chart where I was going, I felt a little disappointment about all the places I wouldn’t be going. That happy little period dried up all too quickly.

As I was hammering out the details, I was becoming increasingly paranoid that the flights would book up before I’d solidified my plans and I wouldn’t be able to go squat anywhere. I really started to sweat it out when the pass precipitously sold out a day before the window JetBlue had set aside to sell them ran up.

“We wanted to ensure those who bought the pass could get the flights they want, so we capped the number of passes we would sell,” said JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin to Reuters.

As I would find out over the course of this trip, changing my plans left and right, however, I really didn’t have anything to worry about. Dervin and JetBlue had done their jobs—well, sort of.

Tomorrow: Booking the Flights!