JetBlue’s new tagline: “Awesome, but only in the best case scenario.”

Still stuck in the airport for more than 8 hours at this point. Here’s the complaint I sent JetBlue:

While I don’t feel courteous, I’ll be courteous so you can understand my concern. Right now, my flight is delayed at a minimum of eight hours. That, however, is only part of the issue. Sure, I understand weather related things happen, and it’s out of JetBlue’s control, but at some point your operational departments probably should have had a better way of dealing with the situation.

Apparently, our aircraft was delayed out of JFK five hours due to weather (and JFK’s incompetence, which is massive.) At that point, someone back at JetBlue HQ should have been doing the crewmember math and saying “in a worst case scenario, if our crew members are delayed five or more hours, they won’t be legal to fly on the way back due to the FAA’s rest rules.” Instead, I get the feeling the JetBlue people weren’t looking at the worst case scenario. Instead, I’m stuck here at the airport for AT LEAST three additional hours waiting for in-flight crews to take their positions.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I found out there’s a flight out of Burbank taking off in 20 minutes from now, that I might have had a chance of getting on board had someone at JetBlue properly planned for the crew member scenario. I feel like this gross negligence is unacceptable, and calls in to question JetBlue’s reliability as an airline. I’ve always been a big proponent of JetBlue, and frequently recommended the company to friends, but recently it seems the airline is experiencing major growing pains and is incapable of handling flight contingencies. I’m no legacy carrier fan, but I’ve never had this negative of an experience, even with JFK’s moronic / overbooked handling of their tarmac.

If JetBlue had a tagline, it’d be “Awesome, but only in the best case scenario.”

If any JetBlue representative would like to contact me, I’d be more than willing to post a follow up response here on my blog. We’ll see if they really do care about customer service.

Update: Yeah, so still here and it’s 8:45. I called JetBlue, and had a really helpful and empathetic person say “Yeah, a 10+ hour airport stay is awful.” Felt really empathetic. Then she mentioned, “We should be able to get you a voucher or something,” because she understood my side of the “five hour lead time to find a crew should be enough” dillema. She mentioned I should talk to the desk, which i thought was weird, and as I went to hand over the phone, the person was gone. I called back, and, unsurprisingly, the next person on the phone was a lot less empathetic and thought i was batshit insane for even proposing that I’d get a voucher.

To be clear, it’s less about a voucher for me at this point and more for someone just letting me know they care about the situation. JetBlue claims to be different, but stringing me along and then having (apparently less than trained) employees dangle compensation just to have another one rip it away isn’t a very fun scenario.

10 hours of awful. 5 hours by weather, 5 by jetblue.