TravelingForMiles.com may receive commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on TravelingForMiles.com are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. TravelingForMiles.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers.
Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Traveling For Miles has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Traveling For Miles and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. For more details please see the disclosures at the bottom of every page.
Historically, members of JetBlue’s loyalty program have only been able to use points to save money on the flight portion of a vacation deal but as of today, TrueBlue points can be used to save on the cost of a whole vacation package.
This is what JetBlue has announced:
JetBlue Travel Products […] today announced it is launching a Cash + Points redemption option for JetBlue Vacations, which will allow customers to use TrueBlue points to book their entire vacation package (minus insurance and certain taxes & fees), where previously they could only use their points towards the flight portion of a flight + hotel package.
For JetBlue Vacations customers who are ready to book travel but do not have enough TrueBlue points to cover the full cost of their entire trip, TrueBlue members are now able to make up the difference by using a combination of cash and points towards their flight, hotel and even a rental car.
The minimum number of points that can be used for a Points + Cash booking is 500 points and the number that a customer wants to use can be changed by using a slider that’s now provided on the website or by manually entering the number of points to use.
How it works when booking JetBlue Vacation packages:
- Select ‘Use TrueBlue Points’
- Start a JetBlue Vacations package search on jetbluevacations.com
- Select your flight + hotel package
- On payment page, choose the exact number of points you wish to redeem using the slider tool
TrueBlue points may be redeemed for the flight, hotel, and car portions of a JetBlue Vacations package, any time, with no blackout dates. They still, however, cannot be applied to a flight + cruise package, travel insurance, and certain taxes and fees.
Quick thoughts
As things stand, the JetBlue vacations website is causing me no end of issues so I haven’t been able to get to the end of the checkout process to play with whatever kind of “slider” JetBlue has now made available. I have, however, been able to price up a vacation without going that far.
Given that JetBlue is offering me the choice of paying $3,575.41 or 478,500 points for this dummy flight+ hotel booking, it looks like JetBlue is valuing TrueBlue points at ~0.75 cents each and whichever way you look at it, that’s not a good deal.
I usually find that I can redeem TrueBlue points for flights at around 1.1 – 1.2 cents each without too much trouble so being given the option to use them at just 0.75 cents each isn’t exactly appealing.
That being said, cash is still king so if your priority right now is to preserve cash but you would still like to get away on a break, using TrueBlue points at a “bad” rate would probably be a better idea than spending cash that would otherwise be put to better use.
Outside of a scenario such as that one (or one which includes someone who earns more TruBlue points than they can spend), I can’t see a good reason why regular miles & points fans should be burning points on a JetBlue vacations package.
Bottom line
TrueBlue members can now use their points to cover the whole cost of the vacation packages that JetBlue will sell them but with only a few exceptions, this will probably be a poor deal for most people.
