Ha! I have encountered a couple B6 (and likely air travel in general) rookies who seemed genuinely confused by the "board by row number" system. I guess if you've started traveling in the last few years, or never left WN, it's a little different!

From what I've seen, it appears to be:

B = Window
C = Middle
D = Aisle

That's terrible. All the aisle folks getting skinned on having to gate check bags? Not ideal.

I'm wondering if they did this to sell priority boarding with Group B and/or add it as a credit card perk

It's a bit more complicated than just groups of Window, Middle Seat, Aisle. It's broken up quite intelligently in terms of raw efficiency but it may break down when people irrationally insist on boarding with family members who are in the next seat.

"The Group B boarding group will be for those with window seats in the back half of the plane. Group C is for passengers in middle seats in the back and front window seats. Group D is for passengers with aisle seats in the back and middle seats up front, while Group E will be for passengers with aisle seats in the forward part of the aircraft...."

From JetBlue to Unveil New Boarding Process

I see this going very poorly.

Again, I've not been traveling on other carriers since many went to group boarding, but I'd hardly say that breaking up family groups to board is going to work well on an airline with a lot of leisure travelers. A lot of times you may have families or groups that don't necessarily need pre-boarding but would desire to be kept together (thinking traveling with kids who are old enough to not need extra time, but not old enough to be sent ahead without parents). You'd think a system could tell if say the middle and aisle seats are on the same reservation, and board both of those passengers with the one group or the other, since they won't block another passenger from getting into the row.

I'll be on a flight tomorrow night (in the scenario described above, middle and aisle) so it'll be interesting to see how it works out.

No indication that the new process will be putting people in one pnr into different groups.

I would highly doubt they break up PNR sharing pax to different groups for boarding.

Unfortunately, the system B6 is implementing won't work terribly well if middle seats or aisles board out of their group.

I don't think it's going to work terribly well regardless.

No judgement until we hear some on the ground reports though.

What will they be doing at stations such as LGB and BUR where they board Front and Rear doors?

Very poorly, probably. JetBlue seems to like to make sweeping changes without thinking of any potential conflicts or exceptions.

The launch of the BOS-LGA shuttle was a prime example of this.

Actually since the new boarding groups system still roughly has a rear to front boarding order, boarding from two doors would probably speed up the boarding process.

Had a bad experience with the new boarding process today. I was group B and the wife was group D. When they called B and we walked up, they wouldn’t let her in with me. Still don’t know why we got different groups, and every other airline allows you to take guest with you while boarding if they are in a worse zone/group. It just felt like they had no idea what they were doing, and were pretty rude about it.

Actually, given that your wife decided not to wait for her assigned group, it appears JetBlue did know what it was doing.


The new process will speed up boarding by virtue of its design but if people try to board outside of their group, it will fail.

If you want to board together, you could buy Even More Space seats or achieve Mosaic status. That's pretty much the only way people traveling together won' be separated during the boarding process.