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Showing posts from July, 2018

JetBlue adding service to Mexico City from New York JFK and Boston

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This week,  JetBlue announced service to Mexico City from JFK and Boston's Logan airport. Given how many Caribbean and Latin American destinations they currently serve, I'm surprised it took them so long to offer this route (they already fly to Mexico City from two of their Florida hubs). The flights are timed really well: JFK 9:58am > MEX 2:25pm MEX 3:55pm > JFK 10:52pm BOS 8:31am > MEX 1:15pm MEX 2:20pm > BOS 8:42pm UPDATE (Sept 2018) : We're booked on this flight in early 2019. Looking forward to doing a trip report for it! They'll be flying these routes with A320s, so sadly that means there's no Mint seats onboard. No word yet on whether the planes will feature their refreshed A320 cabin – given the timing it seems possible the planes might get a plane with the " Phase 1 " update.  Bring your Priority Pass card with you so you can use the lounge in Mexico City Both flights begin service 25 October 2018. JetBlue now

JetBlue points devaluation

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JetBlue has a fixed-value rewards program called TrueBlue, where points are earned based on the cost of the flight and redeemed at a fairly fixed rate based on the current price for the flight. While these types of programs don't let you take amazing 10-cents-per-point aspirational reward flights like our ANA First flight, they do mean that you can easily redeem your points for any seat on any flight without hours of planning and searching for the ever-elusive award seat. Most of the bloggers value JetBlue points at 1.3¢ each . In my own observations, there's been a little bit of variability over the years: I've seen the occasional redemption at 1.4¢ or even as high as 1.7¢. Well, yesterday I was pricing out a one way Mint flight from SFO to JFK and noticed that my Mint flight has reached an all-new low: 1.0¢ .  While it's easy to think, "it's only 7/10th of a cent", that actually represents a 40% devaluation from the rates we were routine

Amazon's targeted 20% off promotion

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The blogs have been abuzz about a targeted 20% promo from Amazon and American Express. I set my Amex as my default credit card in Amazon and then checked my Amazon account with this link to see if I was targeted, and I was! I'm not a huge fan of Amazon because I find the whole experience so baffling unless you're a hardcore Amazon user. You can't even buy some things unless you're Prime, and still others you can't because they're Prime Pantry , or "this is only available as an add-on product". Furthermore, I hate how confusing it is to tell who's actually shipping your order to you and I've had terrible luck getting Amazon to fix purchases that go wrong from outside vendors on their site. End rant .  Because this promo ONLY applies if you spend some number of Amex points on your purchase AND if the product is "Sold By Amazon", I was dreading scouring their site trying to find something I needed that met the criter

YASSS! Philippine Airlines announces nonstop JFK to Manila service!

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RoutesOnline just announced that Philippine Airlines is launching nonstop service between Manila and New York's JFK using an Airbus A350. (Their existing service has a stopover in Vancouver, which is poorly-timed for a 5th freedom flight between the East and West Coasts). We love the Philippines (trip links here ) and will definitely be back at some point in the near future, so this is great news. This new flight should be available starting 4 November 2018. Flight 126 MNL 21:00 – 23:15JFK Flight 127 JFK 01:45 – 07:15 (+1 day) MNL It looks like their A350s will get VantageXL seats, so your 16 hour flight will be fully flat, rather than the angle flat seats they've been keeping around their fleet way longer than everybody else. Sadly the only real points opportunity here is with their one-off partnership with Etihad . Cash fares will likely be $1000-ish in Economy and $4000-ish in Business Class. I still wish they could team up with Brussels Airlines and Airbus to