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There were mixed reactions when JetBlue introduced its Customer Bill of Rights after the Valentine’s Day problems earlier this year. Some thought it was adequate, but others didn’t think it went far enough. Thanks to a frustrated reader’s question, I’ve found a nasty little loophole that you’ll probably want to know before your next flight.

On the 4th of July, I received an email from a reader who had been fighting with JetBlue about compensation. Some parts of the email were exactly what you’d expect to hear from someone flying out of JFK in bad weather this summer . . .

I was scheduled to depart JFK airport at 7:15 PM….At 10:09PM we boarded the plane.We sat there until 4:22AM at which time we took off. My time sitting on the plane & waiting to go down the runway was 6 hrs & 13 minutes. We took off 9 hrs & 7 minutes late.

Sounds like a normal summer day at the most painful airport in the US these days, but something struck me.

The email that I sent Jet Blue a week ago asking if we would get a flight vouched [sic] has not been responded to….I called tonight,waited an hour for a supervisor only to be quickly told that no voucher for future travel would be forthcoming…Is this right?

It certainly didn’t sound right. Actually, it sounded like a job for the Cranky Helper. (I needed a really cheesy name to go with that ridiculous picture.)

A quick trip to JetBlue’s Customer Bill of Rights seemed to back me up. The flight was delayed due to weather issues. Since that’s a “controllable irregularity,” it was obvious that the mere delay wouldn’t be worthy of compensation. But what about the 6-hour ground delay when they were stuck on the plane?

According to JetBlue, customers will be compensated for an onboard ground delay regardless of the cause. “Customers who experience an onboard Ground Delay on Departure for 4 or more hours are entitled to a Voucher good for future travel on JetBlue in the amount paid by the customer for the roundtrip (or the oneway trip, doubled).”

Bingo! Seemed like an easy one to me, so I couldn’t figure out why the reader wasn’t compensated. I decided to call the airline and find out.

JetBlue roughly agreed with the timing of the flight. A combination of thunderstorms, crew delays, and general JFK messiness saw the flight slip later and later. According to them, boarding began between 1030p and 11p, and after they found a replacement crew, the plane finally pushed back at 320a and was in the air at 422a. So at the very best, these people sat on the plane from 11p to 422a before departing for the newly-turned redye – still over a 5 hour delay and certainly eligible for compensation. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of not checking the contract of carriage (PDF).

Ground Delay, as used in Section 36 shall mean a delay involving a flight that, in the case of departures, has boarded and pushed back from the gate but that is not in air and, in the case of arrivals, has landed but has not yet arrived at a gate.

Ooooh, that’s pretty weak. So basically, they can board you but the clock won’t start on the ground delay until the plane actually pushes back. This is a huge hole in their Bill of Rights and it’s bound to anger a lot of people, including my reader. Once you board that plane, you don’t care if you’re at the gate or on the taxiway. You still aren’t getting off, and that should count as a long onboard delay.

There was a slightly happy ending to this story. After my continued prodding, JetBlue agreed to give $50 vouchers to everyone onboard that plane. In their words . . .

Although this compensation is outside the bounds of our Bill of Rights, we are happy to extend this gesture of goodwill because of the unique circumstances of this flight, and the fact that customers were asked to stay on board in anticipation of an imminent departure that kept being pushed back because of the many uncontrollable factors we’ve discussed.

That’s a nice gesture considering that under the contract of carriage they didn’t have to do anything, but it still doesn’t change the fact that this type of delay should without question be covered under the Bill of Rights. I don’t care where the plane is when you’re stuck . . . you’re still stuck. JetBlue did promise to look at this from a policy standpoint as well . . .

This issue has raised an important question that our Airports team will be examining closely: in those situations when we know a ground delay will be prolonged, how do we let customers off without delaying the flight further — for instance, if we have to locate customers in the terminal prior to the new departure time. We always want to ensure everyone’s comfort but we certainly don’t ever want to leave anyone behind.

With any luck, we’ll see a real change here, but I’m not holding my breath. I do have to say that I appreciate JetBlue’s responsiveness to my inquiries, so I’ll hold a sliver of hope that this will get changed. But for now, keep this in mind when traveling on the airline.

It’s time to shake off all the bad news from last week and move forward with something positive. United has finally unveiled the new business class seat, and it looks like a rock star to me. I’ve rarely had nice things to say about UA lately, but they’ve definitely done this right. You can read all about it in this press release, which must have been released just after midnight on the east coast.

When I look at that shot, the first thing that stands out are those 15.4″ individual tv screens. Nice and big, and yes, it will have full audio/video on demand. And by the way, as announced awhile ago, you can plug your iPod in to the system, listen to your music, and recharge as you fly. There’s also a USB port and a standard 110V plug so you can charge just about anything.

The bed is 6’4″ when flat, and it IS fully flat. American just rolled out their angled lie flat seat, so this has to piss them off. They haven’t even finished installing the seats and they’re already miles behind their biggest US competitor.

First Class is getting a makeover as well. The suites on the 777 and 747 aircraft will be upgraded with the new AVOD system as well and the seats will get some more subtle upgrades as well. The 767s will finally get the suite after years of having a substandard product.

So, the product is awesome, but now the big question . . . can the airline actually make them pay for themselves? They’ve got to start having fewer upgrades and more fare-paying customers in these seats. Now that the seat is at a world-class standard, they need to start charging like a world class airline. (Um, that’s assuming they can find a way to deliver world class service as well.)

When you look at the aircraft configuration, you can see that United is taking steps in the right direction.

They’ve made the business class seats alternate facing forward and backwards in order to fit more seats on the plane. BA pioneered this concept, and it really enables a lot more seating while maintaining the lie-flat seat. So now, United will actually have 8 across in business class on the 777 but the seats are longer so they take up more real estate.

To compensate for that, they’re reducing the number of seats in the premium cabins. The 747 gets the biggest change with an almost 8% increase in seating. First, Business, and Economy Plus all shrink in order to bump up the Economy Minus cabin size. This is great for routes that are lower in business demand. The airline can now finally put more seats where they need them.

The 777, on the other hand, gets the bump in Economy Plus. So this plane can be used for more business-oriented routes. The 767 just loses room all around, probably a lot of that has to do with the addition of the First Class suites to the plane.

United has done well here. The frequent flier who thrives on upgrades to business class won’t be happy since there are now fewer seats onboard to upgrade to, but those aren’t the people United wants. United can now actually compete for the paid Business Class traveler. For that segment, they don’t need as many Business Class seats. They just need the ones they have to be great.

It’s just been one long week of problems in the industry, that’s for sure. Of course, the biggest and most tragic was the TAM accident in Sao Paulo, but huge delays on the east coast due to bad weather, Virgin America’s website failure, and the whole JetBlue-O’Reilly flap made it a difficult week all the way around.

So why shouldn’t we end on a down note? (I know, not what you were looking for going into the weekend.)

At the risk of fanning the flames once again, it’s time to go back to the JetBlue-O’Reilly fight. JetBlue has apparently made the worst decision from a PR standpoint that they could have made in this situation, and that’s why they get the not-so-coveted Cranky Jackass award.

According to DailyKos, JetBlue told the website to pull the sponsorship banner down. They’ll still give them the tickets, but now they don’t want any recognition for it.

Are you kidding me, JetBlue? Now O’Reilly supporters still hate you because you’re still giving them tickets, but DailyKos supporters hate you as well because you’re hiding your support. Way to go, champ.

I’m sure we’ll hear some excuse like, “oh, they weren’t allowed to use our banner without permission anyway,” but is that going to help? Nope. They’ve still just found a way to piss people off on both sides of the aisle.

What a week.

Now that the website troubles appear to be beyond them, we can finally take a look at Virgin America’s plan to get things started. I’ll try to keep this post from getting too long, so I’ll save talk about the website itself for another post. Let’s get started.

Schedules

The airline begins flights on August 8 from San Francisco to both New York/JFK and Los Angeles. By the time the end of October rolls around, they’ll also fly from San Francisco to Las Vegas and Washington/Dulles. In addition to SFO, LAX will also have flights to Dulles and JFK. If you think United is in the airline’s sights, you’re right. They compete on every single one of these routes nonstop. I’m sure the wheels are turning at United as we speak on formulating a defense plan.

The Dulles flights aren’t going to very competitive for the business crowd – there are only two flights a day to each city. The Vegas flights appear to be mostly just a case of the airline preferring to fly the planes somewhere rather than sit them on the ground waiting for the next east coast trip. You can almost always make some extra cash heading to Vegas. Then there’s SFO to LAX.

It’s one of the last bastions of Southwest-free flying on big routes in the West. So when Virgin America comes in with five flights a day, they’re at least trying to make a dent. Unfortunately, there are some gaping holes in the schedules. For instance there are no flights from LAX to SFO between 630a and 1140a. Actually, it’s the same hole on southbound flights. Can they do better than Frontier, who just pulled out of the market? I’m not convinced at all, especially since most of their amenities really aren’t that important on such a short flight. That doesn’t mean I won’t try them on my next trip up north!

The crown jewel appears to be the route they announced would be their first – San Francisco to New York/JFK. They will have four flights a day once the ramp up is complete, and that’s a pretty healthy schedule. They’re lacking a midday and late evening flight heading west and a midday and late afternoon flight going east, but that’s not a dealkiller. They do have some heavy competition here, though.

United and American both offer three class service while JetBlue helps cover the coach market. Can their powerports and cool vibe beat JetBlue’s 2 to 4 extra inches of legroom? Not so sure about that. But from trip reports I’ve seen, JetBlue doesn’t even seem to be able to fill their flights on that route too well. Can Virgin’s four more flights find enough passengers?

I’ve put a full list of their schedules up here.

Fees and Such

As far as fees go, they seem to be quite fair. Most fares have a $40 change fee, though the first class seat I priced didn’t have one at all. There is no option to search for refundable fares, so I’m going to assume they have none.

If you want an exit row or the bulkhead in row 3, you’re going to have to pay more for it. I looked at SFO-Vegas and it was $15, but SFO-JFK was $25, so they use variable pricing based on length of flight. Good idea.

I love that on the seat map, you can click on a First Class seat and it will prompt you with an upgrade option. I don’t think they’re making it any cheaper than if you picked First Class initially, but it’s a good way to upsell anyway.

eleVAte

The airlines has launched with a frequent flier program, eleVAte (with annoying spelling and all), ready to go. It’s a pretty simple model. You get 5 points for every $1 you spend on tickets. They say you’ll be able to redeem as few as 4,900 points for a free flight, or $980 worth. Of course, it doesn’t say what that’ll get you – they don’t have any specific reward info on the site yet. What we do know is that you can redeem for any seat on any flight. There aren’t any blackout dates either. It’s the SPG program of the airline world.

I like mileage programs that actually reward you for spending more money. It makes no sense to me that other airline programs give you four times more miles for buying a $198 roundtrip flight across the country than they do for buying a $198 roundtrip flight within California. In that case, the second passenger is likely to be more profitable. Ideally, you’d like to tie mileage rewards to profitability, but rewarding it by dollars spent is as close as you can get without making the program too complicated.

I think that’s enough for today. Keep an eye out for more Virginwatch as time goes by.