JetBlue 25 for 25 Strategy Guide
I wanted to share my strategy for completing the JetBlue 25 for 25 promotion. Just as a reminder our goal is to get their ultimate reward of 350,000 travel points and 25 years of JetBlue Mosaic One Status.
Personally, I am unable to take a lot of time off of work, and with only limited weekends I needed to keep my travel schedule as tight as possible. To complete this I focused on trips with layovers (which count toward your 25 hubs, even if you are only there for a few minutes). I also tried to stack flights wherever possible by traveling from destination to destination or by traveling back to a main hub after a morning flight, and then taking an evening flight to a new location.
This is particularly complicated with JetBlue as it is a primarily hub based airline, meaning the majority of flights are to and from smaller airports connected to 3 major hubs airports. The three major hub airports include Orlando, JFK (NYC), and Boston as well as several minor hubs. If you live near New York City, Boston, or Orlando that makes hitting multiple airports easier, but if you are like us and only near a minor JetBlue hub there is a greater challenge.
I started planning my flight routes by first using a flight tracking tool on FlightConnections.com. With this tool I was able to look at all of the destinations I could fly from my local airport (Tampa) and mapped out possible single destinations. I then searched for where these airports connect with JetBlue hubs. It becomes very obvious when looking at this map that the hubs are where the majority of flights will originate.
After I had the general idea of where JetBlue traveled, I moved onto Google Flights to find specific flights on specific days. I really wish from this point there was an easier way to find connecting flights, but this part just takes a few hours of playing with dates and flights.
I was luck to be able to put together a 2 day itinerary for early September which was tackles 5 airports including Cancun, Orlando, San Juan, Fort Lauderdale, La Guardia (NYC). After hitting all 5 hubs, we will fly back home to Tampa. This first trip was the launching point for me to tackle the 25 JetBlue cities. From there I was able to locate several flights that would link up to minor JetBlue hubs. Lastly, I ended up finding morning flights from a major hub that were 2-3 hours flight time, so I could take another flight to the same or different major hub to be able to take an evening flight to a new airport.
The biggest thing I learned was that it is often necessary to mix and match airlines to return to a major airport hub. At first I was stressed about the limitations of flying exclusively JetBlue, but I realized that once an airport was crossed off my JetBlue 25 list, I no longer needed to utilize JetBlue to get back there. Looking at flights there was little price difference between a round trip journey and two one way tickets, so even financially there was no advantage to traveling exclusively with JetBlue.
Currently I have 20 JetBlue flights booked with other flights tentatively planned. One advantage of spreading out booking flights is that I can utilize TrueBlue rewards points gained to book the last 5 destinations to help cut costs down.
Personally, wouldn’t recommend my strategy unless your have a good reason… like writing a travel blog. From a financial standpoint, I am most likely to “break even” on this trip between cash value of the rewards and the money I’ve spent on flights. My big take away from this would be for people who already have some vacations planned to get them up to 10 or even 15 hubs. Using my strategy will help you gain those last 5 or so JetBlue hubs to bump you to the next level as the bonuses really do accumulate exponentially.
For those of you who would like to know the specific routes I am taking, I will be uploading the specific flight routes I will be taking on our blog later this month.
Till next time, safe travels!
