JetBlue TrueBlue - Awful TrueBlue Availability

I am checking for flights I need in March and April 2010, the dates just became available, and all the dates I need, no award flights are available at all.

I checked the seat maps on the flights I was interested in and it looks like there are zero seats sold.

Why is TrueBlue being so tight with award availability? Are they waiting for TruBlue 2.0 so that they can charge me more points and make my current TruePasses worthless?

I am checking for flights I need in March and April 2010


When is Easter next year ? Is it around the dates you are looking at , if so , could that be a factor ? I think a lot of airlines tend to hold back on award inventory for dates when they are pretty sure that they can fill up with regular fare pax - I dont know if that is the case here , but perhaps that is a possibility ?

I checked the seat maps on the flights I was interested in and it looks like there are zero seats sold.Those two things rarely correlate with airlines. They release seats based on what they expect to sell much more than based on what they've already sold. Moreover, airlines are much less frequently opening up all reward seats right when the flights are announced, much like they don't offer up cheap seats right when the flights are announced.

Why is TrueBlue being so tight with award availability? Are they waiting for TruBlue 2.0 so that they can charge me more points and make my current TruePasses worthless?
I'd suggest that the current passes were always of a somewhat limited value, but that they haven't changed significantly on that front lately.

How do you access seat maps without putting in credit card no?

How do you access seat maps without putting in credit card no?

The booking flow process was changed some time ago to display the 'seat selection' screen before the payment screen.

As for award availability, I don't think (but don't quote me) that all award seats are released immediately when the flights go up for sale. That is, it may be some time before the entire award inventory is loaded, and even then may be a few seats at a time. But again, I don't know the details of this process, and this is solely based on my experience in booking an award seat myself.

I think that the award availability is tied to certain fare buckets, and therefore to the price that you're able to buy a ticket for. Anything below a certain price is basically open to be used as award seats or to be sold at that price. If you're looking at a high demand weekend (e.g. Easter) or this far in advance (especially on jetBlue where it's known that they lower their prices closer in when they can't sell the higher priced seats) those fare buckets are unlikely to be open for redemption at this time.

My experience with getting jet blue award flights is that they free up the closer you get to your departure date and are probably tied to fare buckets as dinosims stated.

My experience with getting jet blue award flights is that they free up the closer you get to your departure date and are probably tied to fare buckets as dinosims stated.

Route also can affect availability. The original poster didn't specify what route he is looking for, but chances are that the availability of, say, JFK-BUF is going to be a lot better than LAX-TPA. (The tiered redemption structure of TB2 is designed to deal with this sort of discrepancy.)