JetBlue’s TrueBlue has become the first program in North America to allow for pooling of points amongst a family. The new family pooling program allows two adults and up to five children (21 is the cutoff age) to all contribute points to a single bucket from which they can be redeemed for any customers to travel. This new feature of the TrueBlue program increases the flexibility and value of those points pretty significantly, especially for the occasional JetBlue customer.
There are a few unique factors to the way the pooling is set up within TrueBlue:
- At the time of joining each member chooses how many points to contribute to the pool. This applies both to a one-time opportunity to transfer existing points into the pool for free and also to split future earnings between the family account and a personal account. Extra flexibility here is nice.
- Awards can be redeemed for anyone, not just members of the family. This is different from some other programs (Hello, Avios!) and, again, is extra flexibility which is nice for customers.
- Once points are in the family account the Head of Household has full control over them; no other members can do anything with them.
Essentially the new program allows TrueBlue members to credit points to the account of a different member; everything ends up in the account of the Head of Household, though they are listed by contributor so everyone can see where the points came from. There are limits to the plan such as the size of the family and how frequently people can join/leave families (once per year; should cut down on the gaming) but the overall program is very flexible and very customer friendly. Combined with the relatively new no expiry policy on TrueBlue points and things become quite nice indeed.
There aren’t any real drawbacks from this plan that I can see at first glance (maybe the only 2 adults bit, but hating on that is a bit of a stretch). The commonly cited negatives of other family plans don’t exist with TrueBlue Family Pooling and the extra flexibility bits are pretty darn nice. My only regret is that I may have forgone earning from a family member’s occasional JetBlue flights previously because I knew there would never be enough points for an award. Those few extra sure would’ve been nice in our new family account today. Whoopsie.
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So the individual family members still need their own TrueBlue number? I’ve had a bit of trouble getting my daughter a number because it requires her own email address, and she’s too young to have one. Furthermore their system doesn’t support plus signs so I can’t use something like steve+daughter@gmail.com.
Nevertheless, this seems awesome even if I can only get my wife’s points pooled with my own.
Instead of the + use a period in the middle of the name. steve@gmail is the same as s.t.e.v.e@gmail so it will all come to you but JetBlue won’t know it is the same mailbox at the other end. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html
I had actually tried that too, but their system rejected that attempt because I had a period at the end (essentially I tried s.te.v.e.@gmail.com). But ennervated by your post, I went back and tried it sans the trailing period, successfully created the account and logged in, and signed up for family pooling! Yay!
I’m trying to enroll my son and having issues as well. I can use my alternate email for him, but in order to accept the invite for him it appears it wants him (or me) to sign in. How can he sign in if he doesn’t have a Trueblue account? When we were creating the family account it said that for anyone under 13 the parent would need to accept for them. Well exactly how would I do that? Sign in under my account?
I would create an account using the “special” email address for him, Valerie. Once it is created you (as the adult) would accept on his behalf by answering the email in his account.
Excellent. My wife likes to fly to NYC on Jet Blue sometimes, and this will give us more earning opportunities to get her there for free.
@Steve: I think hotmail has the easiest alias creation process. Create a hotmail account for you say, and then add aliases to it (Google it isn’t obvious). These aliases don’t have to be based on your email address at all, but look like completely normal addresses. But you can with a click set them up to show up in a subfolder. Works pretty well for this sort of thing.
The thing I haven’t figured out is whether to create a TrueBlue account for my daughter right now or not. Unsure if there are regularly bonus points for new accounts she count get if I don’t create the account.
Start a email account for your daughter. My Dog has his own email addy.
Excellent news! Even though Jetblue doesn’t fly out of anywhere near me, except ORD 6 hours away. But it’s nice to see a domestic airline adding this feature nonetheless.