Blue Inc Being Killed Off
 

Blue Inc, JetBlue's business booking tool, is being eliminated, effective tomorrow. The email about it went out this afternoon.

The system was never really fully integrated with the rest of JetBlue's IT. For a long time, points/segments weren't posting correctly to individual users' accounts. Eventually, they fixed that, but lately confirmation emails haven't been going out.

It's probably for the best that JetBlue gets rid of it since they have bigger IT issues to work on. Hopefully, they can develop a good small business tool that mimics the other airlines (you just enter a code at booking for credit) in the future.

Email copy below.

***

Dear BlueInc. Partner,

As you probably know all too well, the complexities of keeping technology updated and running smoothly on multiple websites can be challenging, so after careful consideration, we've decided to retire the BlueInc. website.

Here's what you need to know:

• Effective 10/1/19, the Blue Inc. site will no longer be available for new bookings or managing flights.
• You can use jetblue.com to make new bookings, as well as manage bookings already made in Blue Inc.
• The Blue Inc. site will remain available to view booked flights and perform other administrative functions through the beginning of 2020.
• Your company's TrueBlue points and travel bank balance will be transferred into a new account on jetblue.com, which you can continue to use for employee travel.
• During the transition period, your company points and travel bank balance will temporarily be unavailable.
• Your company's administrator will receive a separate email with instructions on how to activate the new account.
• This will have no impact on your individual TrueBlue account.

I never really heard much about or used the Blue Inc. portal but this is disappointing. I guess JetBlue doesn't want small business travelers :confused: otherwise they would have had a replacement program (like you mentioned with the code) already set up to take over.

-J.

Agreed the integration was lacking (and the email confirmation issue has been longstanding, not just recent) but killing this off destroys the best booking engine the company offered. This sucks.

Wasn't the BlueInc engine the only way to get something to work properly on B6?

I'm not surprised at all. While jetblue.com is often glitchy the blueinc platform felt like a never-ending glitch and always had an outsourced/redheaded stepchild feel to it. I'd love it if they replaced it with a simpler program like what you mentioned. After they finally fixed the issue with the flights never posting (I frequently called to have them manually posted to count toward Mosaic status and earn the bonuses), I spent 2019 dealing with much more obnoxious issues:

For many months I've been unable to book one-way flights originating out of the country because of a weird currency glitch that started in March and was never fixed. The taxes and total flight price would post in the value of the foreign currency with the dollar sign! This means the price wound up being something like $176,718. Naturally, I booked on jetblue.com after seeing that and would have to contact them to get the missing blueinc points. Eventually they told me that the credit card would be charged the correct amount (and it was), but then I was unable to use my travel bank to book anything because it would apply the credit to that absurd amount.

As the months went on the helpful people I spoke to in the earlier months were replaced with people who had foul attitudes and didn't know what they were doing. I was told they couldn't access notes of previous calls, transfer calls, or assist me with booking a flight without charging me (even though glitches made it impossible and previous agents told me to call). They randomly told me that flights booked with travelbank credits don't earn points, which is a flat out lie and I guess a way to avoid helping me. Finally I was emailed in August saying that they don't support this international market even though I've regularly used blueinc for that country since 2016. I guess they knew blueinc was shutting down and stopped fixing issues and providing service this year.

The Past Trips list is impossible to sort properly by date. If you click on Travel Dates it sorts by month then day then year. The sort has never worked since I started using blueinc in 2016. For example, this is the beginning of my list:

1/4/2019
1/5/2017
1/7/2019
1/9/2017
1/12/2018

They also only take calls during standard business hours which was just annoying.

Escapefromnyc004, what you describe broadly matches my experience -- "never-ending glitch" (of which you give a remarkable example, but sadly not the only one) as well as staff increasingly hostile and contradicting (indeed, rescinding) prior commitments from colleagues. A real surprise from an airline I otherwise like and respect.

Where did this end for you? For example, were you shorted Blue Inc points you should have earned had their site worked properly? Any other harms, aside from wasted time?

I followed the email instructions to move my Blue Inc points and travel bank to the normal JetBlue platform -- but still haven't received notification of that move being completed. So at present my points and bank are unavailable to me. Glitch on top of glitch.

Just saw an article today that mentions how AA and WN are growing their business travel programs. Makes this change even more confusing.

American, Southwest expand business travel programs

-J.

BlueInc was such a disaster I suspect it was outsourced to some incompetent IT firm. I’m glad it’s gone. They need to either build business functionality into the main site or just start over altogether.

synzero, did you have any specific problems with BlueInc? I'm sure JetBlue folks are reading this thread and would be interested in your wishlist and even your list of problems and errata.

If they were interested in FT, they wouldn't be serving nuts in Mint or have gotten rid of Bulleit. :rolleyes:

-J.

Well, service adjustments are arguably to be expected from time to time. That's different than the kind of IT blunders synzero seems to have in mind, and Escapefromnyc004 too, and others.

I certainly had at least my share of similar problems with the Blue Inc staff. I don't mind sharing my list of problems -- most prominent on my mind were Travel Bank errata including failure to provide an itemized transaction logs; and dishonoring Mosaic free cancellation benefits. To Blue Inc's credit I never had any trouble getting the standard Mosaic benefits (extra 3 points per dollar) for Blue Inc bookings. I had to write in to get the frequent traveler bonuses in the True Blue program, which weren't automatic, but that at least they granted promptly and politely. On other things they were remarkably disagreeable, condescending, and worse -- even when I was plainly right under applicable program terms, even when their colleagues had made unambiguous written commitments clearing up any possible ambiguity. Ultimately I had to escalate to JetBlue attorneys who, to their credit, admitted error and made me whole.