In the last few years, we have seen airlines be extremely generous with their voluntary bump compensation to avoid having to involuntarily bump someone and have to pay actual cash to that person. So, the vouchers to take later flights have gotten quite high – and still everyone on this flight turned it down!
Every Passenger Turned Down a $10,000 Credit to Fly Later
Matthew over at Live and Let’s Fly shared a story by a passenger who’s account of this flight went viral on TikTok. It was a JetBlue flight to Cancun and JetBlue was offering a $10,000 flight credit (good for a year to anywhere JetBlue flies) and no one on the flight would take the bump voucher!!!
Instead, they upped it and finally got a taker at $15,000! Yes, $15,000 to take a later flight! The later flight would likely have been no more than 24 hours later and this is Cancun so it was likely that most of the people onboard were headed for a vacation.
Would you give up one day of your vacation for $10,000 to travel on JetBlue anytime in the next year? I certainly would! The traveler, Jess Ries, said that she was traveling with 30 of her friends and she didn’t think it was worth it because “JetBlue doesn’t have flights to that many destinations”.
Actually, JetBlue does service a host of destinations, not only in the US but in Central American and the Caribbean and now, London as well. I mean, if she really wanted to splurge with a $10,000 voucher (or, not just her but literally any passenger on that flight!), she could have flown round trip to London in the awesome Mint class – twice. And, depending on when she flew, she would still have some money left over! In fact, if she waited for a sale, she could get 5 round trips out of that!
JetBlue flights to London
I just wish I had been on that flight! There would have been precious few reasons that I would have had to not give up my seat but since we are talking about Cancun, it would not have been likely that those reasons would have applied. 🙂
I am sure that, since her video went viral, she has since learned about all the beautiful places that she could have traveled to with JetBlue with that $10,000 in flight credit! I wonder if she still is ok not taking it?
Would you have bumped for $10,000?
It wouldn’t have taken $10K for me!
Some airlines make you use the entire voucher on one flight. If so, at some point, the extra value is meaningless.
The girl was right about JetBlue…..unless you’re from: Boston, New York, or Fort Lauderdale, they hardly fly anywhere. If she was from Chicago, for example, her opportunities to use that $10k would have been so limited as to not be worth the trouble. Too many blog writers here live in the coastal bubble and thus think that JetBlue is relevant (TPG is terrible about this).
@AngryFlier – you can take a positioning flight. I’ve done that before.
Bingo – still, I’m not sure about not being able to find flights. My home airports are smaller regional airports and we have JetBlue service to JFK which opens up their whole map.
Plus, I wonder if you could use these for AA flights booked through JetBlue? I would think not but wonder how they work it online?
A $10K VOUCHER isn’t worth squat if you can’t use it within a year. If it was cash, i would have jumped at it!
If it would have been Delta, I’m sure they never would have gotten to $10,000 since you can redeem those certs for Amazon gift cards (among others).
The regular Jet Blue certificate terms do say “Certificate cannot be partially redeemed”, so you may have to use it all in use. Maybe the bumo vouchers have different terms. I guess you could do a trip with lot’s of stopovers (if you could also wing other travel costs and could get that much time off).
My nephew was bumped on Frontier for $500, and when asked they said they’d split it into five $100 vouchers. Maybe Jet Blue would do the same.
Of course all that be tough to access in that moment. And the 15K is likely no more useful than the 10K to most people.
I think the bump voucher is not limited on a single use. Also, since JetBlue was in such dire position to get someone to bump, I’m sure they would have been open to do something like 5 $2,000 vouchers.