I had only flown Jet Blue once before (mostly travel international long haul and so have kept my business with those carriers) but we needed a one way flight this weekend to return home from SoCal as a family and Jet Blue offered the best option (ex-LGB). I purchased the tickets via Expedia ,very last minute, and then taking the B6 PNR I went to JetBlue and tried to get seats. I found that there were only buy-up seats in the front of the plane ($40 I think), and lots of them at that. So I called Jet Blue and explained that I would like to take the flight but unless we could get seats together for my family (kids 3/5/7 years old) I'd likely cancel them via Expedia's 24 hour cancellation policy and book with AA or DL. I know B6 is not exactly like the carriers I have experience with, but I could see via Expert Flyer that this flight was still open in various fare buckets, indicating that those empty seats were not likely to be filled unless there were lots of even more last minute buyers than us.

I asked as a courtesy for a waiver of the $40 fee for 5 seats in the front and the very polite agent took a quick look at the seat map and put us in row 4 and 5. Probably a decent marketing move on their part, we normally fly transcon SEA-JFK a few times a year as a family and pick DL or AA where we can get either discounted F or their Eco+ seats, but my wife said she liked B6 more and would be happy to pay for whatever the upcharge is if it fell somewhere between discounted F and economy (which it generally does). Great experience overall, happy to have opened our mind to a new option for our SoCal and NYC travel.