Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II), here (Part IIb), here (Part III), here (Part IV), here (Part V).

Wherein Our Hero Eats Turkey & JetBlue Makes Boo-koo Bucks Off of Him

It’s been a while since my last post, admittedly, but with good reason. As I said in a previous post, I acquired a nice little nest of 35 points for buying the All-You-Can-Jet and got quite close to a free roundtrip.

Thanksgiving has put me over the threshold, which, this year, in terms of JetBlue eating my money, was significant.

You see, my dear CRM-heads (to retool a phrase we use over at Speech Tech), I was an awful procrastinator buying tickets to fly home to Florida this year. For a while I wasn’t sure, because of work, whether I would even make it. I ended up having to contend with the mercenary fares the airlines charge two weeks in advance of the carbon-emission-nightmare free-for-all that is holiday travel.

[More after the jump...]

According to the airline-fare meta-crawlers, some of the “legacy” airlines wanted to charge me between $700 and $800 to eat with my family. The low-costers were asking far less — and, in the end,Southwest actually had the best fares available to me. They were somewhere around $50 or $60 round trip. Under all normal circumstances, I probably would have taken them up on that, but  I went JetBlue for the points.

Actually, all things told, the fares, though cheaper, were high enough for me to second guess a flight altogether. I was thinking Teleconference Thanksgiving for me and mine this year. The prospect of another free trip to somewhere warm in the middle of January was enough to push me over the top and take the hit for the ticket, though, knowing full well that I’ll be slugging JetBlue back with an expensive flight out to the West Coast, on them.

All this happened to coincide with a massive restructuring of the way that JetBlue awards points, too. About a month ago the airline switched to a point system with no expiration dates. Before, you had to cash your points within a year lest you lose them. The points that I had accrued under the old system are still going to expire, but as part of the transition they were given an extension of a couple of months.

Some of those points were from my trip back home for Turkey Day last year and I was going to lose them before I could cash them. It’s awfully nice that that’s not going to happen and that I’m going to get my free trip. A larger question still looms about this whole All-You-Can-Jet pass, though. As we can see, the airline, as a direct result of its promotion, managed to make some extra holiday extortion money off of me, but am I also a more loyal customer? Has my behavior changed as a result?

In the end: yeah. I like the airline more. Because of my experience with it, I’m willing to trust it. I’ve had some bad experiences accruing points in other airlines frequent flyer miles systems and JetBlue’s has been a welcome change, so that may affect future decisions when I have to fly.

That said, there are some occasions when I definitely would not fly JetBlue. They have a rather onerous penalty fee if you miss a flight (see this post). I wouldn’t book with them unless I had every confidence that I was going to be able to make my trip.

But, all-in-all? JetBlue = Good CRM.