NLS

Tonight I am being shown a $15 fee for redeeming TrueBlue points. It seems to be the same regardless of a one-way or round-trip booking.

AutoSlash

What routing are you searching? Does it show as taxes and fees or something else?

NLS

It shows as the “fare” on top of the points and the usual $5.60 passenger fee. It is per passenger but is the same one way or RT. I contacted customer service and they were unaware of any change.

NLS

It is not showing any more -- the customer service rep said there were web issues all day and this might have been a glitch. They said if I had been charged they would reverse it. (I'm now just getting a plain old error message when I try to redeem points.)

GW McLintock

Sounds more to me like they were trying something out. If they were to implement an award booking fee, that would be enough to make me jump ship permanently. Even seeing something like this test run makes me want to burn my points sooner rather than later.

-J.

marathonerNYC

Was this an international route (where redemption costs due to taxes are higher)? What day were you searching for? It could have been a surcharge placed on a Peak Travel days.

Did you possibly have "Cash + Points" selected (or was this auto-selected b/c you didn't have enough points for the redemption)?

If this was a true vanilla domestic point redemption, the $5.60 / direction fee would apply.

AutoSlash

We can confirm the discovery by NLS . We just tried to make a points booking for LAX-JFK and found that Jetblue was trying to slip in an extra $15 (per person) fee which was not disclosed earlier in the booking process. The below screenshots speak for themselves:

AutoSlash

And the final charge:



No idea why the payment of $30 (15 per pax) shows up in red?

GW McLintock

Burn your points and jump ship (or start crediting to AA).

-J.

hi55us

Well that's just horrible. I've had it with these companies that make charges like this appear to be taxes and fees as well.

nsx

I did a points booking for 2 travelers one way this week. The total price had an extra $30 or $35 so I backed out and started over. Then I got the correct $11.20 plus bag fees.

guv1976

Have you verified the amount of the authorization on the MasterCard that was used?

diburning

Could this simply be a bug in the redemption system where it thinks you're trying to pay with cash + points?

AutoSlash

There was a $30 authorization on my card for a few days but it seems to have fallen off as of today. It does looks like a bug in B6's system as opposed to some nefarious deed.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." (or incompetence in this case)
-Halon's razor

ultrasoul

AutoSlash Can also confirm it seems to be B6 IT issue. Like you, on the first few screens there were no $10 fee shows up until the very end page of the checkout process. Was a bit surprised but went ahead with ticketing. I was going to call Mosaic desk to get the $10 fee credited but noticed that at ticketing, only $5.60 was actually taken out from my travel bank balance (no $10 fee deducted from travel bank balance).

Due to some changes in plan, I ended up having to cancel this reservation a few days later. Miles redeposited ASAP automatically but the $5.60 in taxes paid with travel bank did not (my past experience has been both miles + travel bank payments refund instantly). A FB messenger to B6 customer service took care of the manual $5.60 push of tax refund back to travel bank as I was looking at a 2+ hour phone wait even as a Mosaic