I am a huge Jet Blue fan — and I’ve been very vocal about it. So you can imagine my confusion about their lousy performance during the Valentine’s Day snowstorm. How dare they act like a regular airline?
Full disclosure: my downstair’s neighbor, Phizz was one of those stuck at the airport on Friday. She, too, is a huge Jet Blue fan. She flies out to California frequently. Heck, she’s practically bi-coastal. I’m guessing she didn’t make it to California, yet. I hope she does. I’m wondering how she feels about Jet Blue now. Phizz?
Sure, I’ve heard about other airlines trapping passengers in planes on the tarmac for hours and hours — but Jet Blue always seemed above all that. Jet Blue was the alt airline, the airline that really tried to empathize with their passengers, the airline that was thinking outside of the box and doing things right. What happened? Are they getting too big for their blue britches and beginning to act like other airlines?
I am curious to see their attempt at damage control. My fantasy is that they’re working around the clock to figure out ways to avoid something like this happening again. They were the airline that locked the cockpit door after 9/11 and gave out free hand lotion and other fun things from Bliss after the liquid bomb scare.
Let’s see what they do now.
p.s. To add insult to injury, and demonstrate that with just the slightest effort on JetBlue’s part we really should have been able to get on the flight, our bags DID make it, and got to the final destination right on time, some 8 hours before we did after our awful night and 90-minute taxi ride. And I neglected to mention that while we saet on the tarmac, I told the flight attendant we had a very close connection and perhaps he could help us make our way to the front of the plane to get off quickly and he not only refused but called the flight attendant at the front of the plane and complained about us, standing about 4 feet away from us.
I was a big Jet Blue fan from Day 1, even though over the years there were a couple of little bumps – issues with expired credits even though there was no notice that it would expire or was about to expire, that sort of thing.
But they lost me last October when I had to spend an awful night at JFK after missing a connection because the flight coming in was delayed for some mysterious weather issue elsewhere in the world, then we sat on the tarmac for half an hour or more. Even so, the gate agent when we got off said, go ahead you can make it – apparently without communicating to the other gate agent, as we got there – 100 yards away – to find them just closing the door and not remotely interested in the fact that this was the ONLY FLIGHT to our destination for more than 14 hours.
I have had close connections, and missed them as well, in airports all over the US and Europe, and I have never been treated so badly nor missed a flight that was so clearly able to wait another 60 seconds to let us on. In fact, I have sat on flights held for 20 minutes or more for people making connections, and this one closed the door exactly on time. I had also called reservations on my cell phone from the tarmac to make sure we were good – and while I didn’t know before just now that they have Utah housewives answering their phones, I can say that in hindsight that was exactly the level of knowledge, understanding and assistance I got – NONE. She literally had no idea why I was calling her or what I expected her to do, and made clear that what she could do was precisely nothing. She said she had no way to contact anyone at JFK.
No one affiliated with Jet Blue appeared to care in the least that it was almost midnight and we had nowhere to go, and when I said instead of waiting for the afternoon flight the next day (the second day of a four-day weekend) we wanted to go on the 6 a.m. flight to a nearby city with ground transportation to our real destination, they at first balked. Then after booking it, they gave me paper that turned out not to be boarding passes so we couldn’t get through security and wait in the concourse, but required us to get in another checkin line at 4 a.m., after a very cold night on concrete benches in the international terminal. We got to the other destination to find there had been no arrangement for the ground trasnportation and learn that they expected me to pay for the ground trasnportation and be reimbursed at the original destination, except the manager wasn’t there to reimburse …..
This is the short version of a hideous, long, nightmare that precludes me ever using Jet Blue again no matter what they pretend to do to recover from this massive exposure of their massive incompetence and lack of compassion or any basic customer-service principles. I have nothing but the greatest empathy for their victims last week. When I have a little more time and energy, I will post somewhere the email exchange I had with their “customer service” people – it too is an eye-opener if there were any doubt about Jet Blue’s attitude toward customers and their responsibility to their customers.
Problems:
A bad management team that made bad decisions -not moving planes out of the area when the storm was underway
Only one big hub-Continental for example could easily have moved lots of planes to Houston or Cleveland where they have many gates.
Airbus planes that do not tolerate cold very well (or so the JBLU Yahoo board says)
This will permanently damage this airline I fear.