Helpful advice for travelers

If you hold tickets on JetBlue, and your flight is canceled, your choices are as follows: accept a seat on the next available JetBlue flight, or get a refund to your credit card and make your own travel arrangements.  (They do not have reciprocity arrangements with any other airline.)

We discovered this yesterday, when JetBlue cancelled our Sunday flight to RDU well after we had arrived at the airport... and the next available seat on a JetBlue flight was on Tuesday.

The "customer service" people at the airport were of absolutely no help.  The 800 number to JetBlue wasn't being answered.  

So we came back home and managed to claw our way onto a US Airways puddlejumper for Monday night.  I may actually be strapped to the wing on this flight.

I think that's about it for JetBlue and me.

Ex-LAX

Dear Barry Campbell,

Due to the unprecedented rise in the cost of jet fuel, JetBlue will not be starting service from Los Angeles International (LAX) May 21st as previously announced. We sincerely apologize for the disruption to your travel plans and we hope that you understand this difficult decision. We have taken the liberty of rebooking your flights to and from Long Beach, CA. Your new itinerary is detailed below.

Your flight... on [REDACTED], departing New York, NY (JFK) and arriving in Los Angeles, CA (LAX) has been cancelled.

You are now confirmed on flight... on [REDACTED], now departing New York, NY (JFK) at... and arriving in Long Beach, CA (LGB)...

JetBlue really wanted me to get this message. They sent some variation of it to me five times... and then there was no way to re-route this flight via their web site; had to talk to a customer service rep.

In their defense, I have to say that the customer service agent I spoke to answered right away, was mighty nice, and was more than willing to re-route us to and from Burbank, California as opposed to Long Beach.

So we're still gonna make it to that wedding at the end of the month.

Excerpts from a love letter to a CEO

To: Mr. David G. Neeleman, Chief Executive Officer, JetBlue Airways Corporation

...I was one of the passengers affected by your system failure last week on the East Coast. Thank God, I wasn’t one of the passengers stuck on the tarmac in the snow, but I was booked on a flight that you cancelled several days after the bad weather had passed...

...Your notification e-mail invited me to call an 800 number for assistance with cancellation and rebooking. OK, I called. And called. There was no one there to answer the telephone when I called (repeatedly, and often) on Saturday. Or Sunday. There wasn’t even an Interactive Voice Response system to “interact” with... just a deadpan recording advising me that you were experiencing high call volume, couldn’t take my call right now and please call back later. If you want to “bring humanity back to air travel,” may I suggest that a good place to start would be to have a sufficient quantity of actual human beings manning the telephones to assist your customers?

...So, let’s sum up. Flight cancelled, no help of any kind available from JetBlue to rebook, no sign of my $298 from the cancelled flight, a few hours of work ahead of me restructuring two weeks’ worth of planned meetings and appointments, and a bad, bad taste left in my mouth...

...Back to Continental and American for a while, I guess. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of miles flying on those two airlines, and I know from experience that they won’t offer JetBlue’s customary level of service and comfort, but I also know, from experience, that when there are system disruptions on one of those airlines, they figure out a way—and have the resources available—to help me get where I’m going.

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