Another shout out to Anshul at PMB as I saw this on his Twitter feed and then started to see it all over the place! JetBlue has finally announced service to Canada after years of being asked to do so by travelers on both sides of the border! The airline announced yesterday that they will start flying to Vancouver from New York JFK and Boston in the summer of 2022.
This is welcome news for travellers out of Vancouver and one can only hope that this means the airline will also look at adding more Canadian cities should these routes be successful. The addition of flights to Canada adds yet another country to JetBlue’s roster – an airline that has recently been expanding internationally as they will also being flying to London out of New York and Boston. One will have to wonder if JetBlue will time the flights from Vancouver to connect to with those UK flights or rather have them connect to the airline’s extensive network of Florida and Caribbean flights. Right now it is too early to tell however as the schedules have not been set. We do know from the press release that the New York flights will operate year round while the Boston flights will be seasonal. The latter shows that JetBlue is looking to gain a share of Alaska cruise traffic as that is the typical reason for a lot of summer seasonal flights to Vancouver.
JetBlue is famous for their service and also their amazing but limited Mint Suite product. The Mint product is their business class offering which they have on part of their fleet on their main coast to coast routes in the U.S., select Caribbean routes and it will be placed on their London routes. We don’t know if Mint will be on the Vancouver route but I believe it would be smart of them to do so to try and pull business traffic away from Air Canada. Again time will only tell if this will happen!
Another thought that has emerged from this announcement is could there be a possible Westjet JetBlue tie up be in the cards? Yes, JetBlue is close to American Airlines and WestJet lost their partnership with American due to their relationship with Delta but that hasn’t stopperdairlines like these two from forming partnerships. I mean one of the best known names in the airline industry, David Neeleman, who started JetBlue was a key consultant to helping WestJet get off the ground so the two carriers definitely have some commonalities that way. Then when you take the two cities that JetBlue is flying to from Vancouver, New York JFK and Boston, are also both in WestJet’s network and you have more similarities. WestJet has flown to New York JFK for many years now and were just getting ready to start service into Boston when the pandemic hit.
JetBlue does have their own frequent flyer program called TrueBlue and I do track JetBlue TrueBlue bonus offers on my global site, FrequentFlyerBonuses.com but now that they are coming up north here I’ll be adding a TrueBlue bonus points page to the Rewards Canada website as well.
Learn more about JetBlue coming to Canada here.
Title image via JetBlue