Why I Love JetBlue…Again

I really did want to go to the OpenSolaris Summit this weekend. Honestly. Even though it’s on a weekend, and in a relatively inconvenient location (for me). If nothing else, I need to keep up my “fix the shell” campaign. Unfortunately, JFK had other plans. If I didn’t have project calls this afternoon, I’d still probably be going. But c’est la guerre.

My original, OpenSolaris Summit-free itinerary had me headed out of Maine to Las Vegas (for IBM’s Information On Demand conference) Sunday evening. After some forceful persuasion (read: Twitter bullying), I made the late decision to try and squeeze in the OpenSolaris event. Forgetting the hotel and car arrangements which aren’t the point of this little anecdote, here’s what JetBlue allowed me to do – or did for me.

1. Cancel only the first half of my flight to Vegas. Many airlines will not permit this, as if tickets bought under a roundtrip arrangement are an all or nothing proposition. This was huge.
2. Not only did they let me cancel it, I did so online without talking to anyone, or worse, being on hold for hours. Also huge.
3. Was able to book a one way from Portland to SFO instead of Vegas at a reasonable cost, again online. Pretty standard.
4. When I showed up at the airport yesterday, my flight from Portland to JFK had been delayed enough (4:10 – 5:40) to make my connection from JFK to San Francisco highly problematic, so they’d already rebooked me on the later connection by the time I arrived. Not as big, but still nice.
5. When the connection was subsequently delayed another 3 plug hours, making a successful transit to SFO more or less impossible, they allowed me to rebook my originally cancelled flight to Vegas – at no additional cost, overriding the fare (I couldn’t take a flight today because of project work this afternoon).

Contrast that with the experience you get with the major carriers, and I think most would agree that the JetBlue way of doing things is far more customer friendly. More to the point, it’s a good business decision on their part. By waiving change fees and fare differences and generally making life easier for me, they further cement their status as the airline that I fly exclusively when I have the option (which I don’t, flying from Denver to the West Coast…yet).

Anyway, my apologies to the OpenSolaris crowd, but as I told someone yesterday, just make up signs that say “CHANGE THE SHELL” and it’ll be just like I was there.