Update 4/3/19: When this was originally posted in June of 2016 Mint flights were getting 1.7¢ in value. At some stage this dropped to 1.4¢. TPG is now reporting that this has dropped even further and JetBlue Mint flights are getting approximately 1.09¢ in value.
In the post we’re going to look at how much JetBlue TrueBlue points are worth. JetBlue points can be used for the following things:
- Flights on JetBlue
- Flights On Hawaiian Airlines
- JetBlue Vacation Packages
- Magazines
- Newspaper Subscriptions
- Charity Donations
Let’s take a look at each of the options and see how much value you can get from your JetBlue points.
Contents
JetBlue Flights
JetBlue doesn’t have an award chart like most other airlines, instead points can be used for all flights that are bookable with cash (there is a 3,500 1,000 point minimum that must be redeemed though). The amount of points that is required is tied to the cash value of the flight and some other factors as well. Wandering Aramean has a really in depth post on the value of points that I’d recommend reading. I’ll summarize the post into a quick few bullet points for quick reference.
- Points can be redeemed for a minimum of 0.97¢ per point
- Points can be redeemed for a maximum of 1.89¢ per point
- The average value per point is 1.41¢
- Mint fares (basically their business class product) 1.09¢ per point
- International redemptions provide a better average point value than domestic
Knowing that you can get a baseline value of 0.97¢ per point is useful.
These maximum values don’t always seem to be accurate anymore, as recently you could get almost 5¢ per point on flights to Cuba.
Hawaiian Airline Flights
Hawaiian Airline flights used to follow the same rules as above but on December 22nd, 2017 they added an award chart. The award chart is as follows:
Vacation Packages
It’s not possible to book a vacation package with only JetBlue flights, you must use a combination of points & cash. You also won’t earn any JetBlue points on these bookings, nor will you be able to use a promotional code with these bookings. I did a few searches and they all seemed to return a value of 1.55¢ per point (I’m not sure if that’s just a fixed rate of I got lucky).
Just keep in mind you’re missing out on 6x JetBlue points when using cash + points and that usually it’s going to be cheaper to book the hotel and flight separately (especially when you account for discounts you can get from third party hotel websites). It might be worth considering a Vacation Package if you have the JetBlue Plus (personal or business card) as you get a $100 statement credit annually.
Magazine/Newspaper Subscriptions
Points can be redeemed for magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Let’s take a quick look at two options that might be popular:
- TIME Magazine (52 issues): 1,200 points (~$30 value for 2.3¢ in value)
- Wall Street Journal (304 issues): 3,200 points ($12 for 12 weeks introductory rate, rough value of 1.625¢ in value)
I compared to the RRP, nobody really pays the recommend price for these magazine or newspaper subscriptions these days. There will also be a limit to the amount of magazines/newspapers you want to be receiving.
Charity Donations
It’s possible to donate JetBlue points to select charities. Unfortunately these donations are not tax deductible. There is a minimum of 500 points that can be donated and all of the points go directly to the charity.
Our Verdict
Realistically the only thing you’ll want to redeem your JetBlue points are for flights with either JetBlue or Hawaiian Airlines, I don’t think any of the other options provide good value. At minimum you’re looking at about 1¢ in value and a maximum of about 1.4¢, JetBlue doesn’t provided outsized value on business/first class international flights like other airlines but they do provide some good value none the less. If anybody has any thoughts/corrections then let me know in the comments.
You might also be interested in other posts in our valuation series:
Could I request a 2020 update to this page, please? I just saw the offer posted today on doc for the Barclays 100,000 points offer for the personal and business JetBlue cards and clicked the link to this page to get more info as I’ve never used JetBlue before.
I would like to take advantage of the 100,000 points for future travel use if they are decent value.
Have there been any changes or de-valuations since the last update in April 2019?
On Domestic filghts with JetBlue for the past year and a half, I’ve noticed that “the better off you are, the better off you are.
That is, the closer to “totally insignificant” the cash price of your flight is, the closer to 2CPP your redemption will be.
And the closer to “expensive as heck” the cash price of your flight is, the closer to 1CPP your redemption will be.
A 1-way at $50 will cost you, like, 2600 points. But a 1-way at $110 will cost you 7,400 points. Cash price only doubled, but points price tripled. A 1-way above $200 is probably worth saving your points on and paying cash if you fly JB often enough to catch fare sales.
Domestically, as of 2019, it seems to me that a good cash fare sale is a BETTER points fare sale with JetBlue. Which incentivizes you to spend them judiciously on little nibbles of flight, rather than earn & burn them on a grand vacation, I suppose — kind of a shame (since they could devalue at any point). OTOH, has worked out okay for me, 3x/year flying a route that frequently goes on sale.
Possibly worth mentioning in all this is the 10%-20% in unlimited points rebates you can get by stacking the JetBlue credit cards.
Exactly how you want to compute this rebate is up to you, but if I’m considering where to transfer my, say, Citi points, knowing each point converted is actually worth 1.1 or 1.2 times the typical redemption value could change the best transfer partner.
There is no such thing as a 20% rebate, that is dead, wherever you read that from.
Will: Am I missing something here?
“Mint fares (basically their business class product) 1.09¢ per point” which seems to be towards the bottom of redemptions and then you write “real value seems to be in their Mint product”?
Yeah didn’t update fully, let me fix
Please don’t fall for bad TPG reporting. Higher flight prices have always been around 1c. They are comparing a cheap mint flight vs current expensive flights. Search expensive economy flights as well and you will see 1cpp there as well. Over a certain $ threshold the value goes down. (I don’t know this number exactly but I am sure with some work it could be figured out). Find a cheap mint flight and you will see 1.4 again
I just did a few searches out of BOS with Mint flights as cheap as $449, and it’s consistently getting right around 1. This is a sad development.
The biggest problem I have with JetBlue is their “weather cancellations” when there is no inclement weather and their horrendous delays. JetBlue just hit a new low in the January 2019 DOT report as the lowest of the 10 US carriers in on time arrivals, even worse than frontier. As for cancellations, JetBlue ranked 13 out if 17 below every major US carrier and even below Southwest, who at least had an excuse for their cancellations because of the issue with their mechanic unions. So while the points may get you a cheap flight, you might want to factor in what it will cost you if you won’t get where you want because you will get there 5 hours late or won’t get there until 2 days later if they cancel your flight.
I also noticed that. I have been having lots of minor delays from 30 minutes – 2 hours which are really annoying when the weather is perfect and every other airline at the airport has no delays.
I think they have the Delta problem… Lots of planes go in or out of JFK/BOS at some point in the day, so any issues there cascade through the rest of the network.
JetBlue can also be transferred to Amtrak using points.com at a 2:1 rate, which yields ~1.4 cent value on non-saver (and non-Acela) Amtrak reservations.
Any recent changes?
For folks with Mosaic status (who can use Points to upgrade to Even More Space seats), upgrade seats is by far the best value for TrueBlue Points. On a recent cross-country flight, the price to upgrade to EMS was $95 or 1,100 Points—that’s 8.6cpp. Obviously, you can only redeem Points for EMS seats once you’ve booked a flight, but, in theory, you can book a flight using cash and upgrade your seat using Points.
Yeah except that other airlines give their elite flyers upgrades to these slightly better seats for free and Jetblue makes you pay points and think you got great value.
so if i am unable to take one of the flights can i book the roundtrip from my account for someone else?