JetBlue Family Pooling: 5 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Setting up Family Points

Traveling with a crowd isn’t cheap, so it makes perfect sense that families planning vacations would want to make the most of all their resources—including frequent-flyer awards. It’s that impulse to maximize points that drew me to the JetBlue Family Pooling program.

My kids travel with me sometimes. They don’t really rack up the miles, but it would be nice to put their occasional points to use. And that’s just what the JetBlue Family Pooling program offers: the chance to consolidate points to increase our rewards power and make travel a little more affordable.

Two additional features of the JetBlue family points program appealed to me as well. Family Pooling allows my spouse and me to move points back and forth, and it gives me (as the primary organizer of all things travel in our house) a single dashboard for points management when my family flies JetBlue.

So I cleared out 15 minutes to set up JetBlue Family Pooling for my family. Here’s what I learned.

Setting up a JetBlue Family Pooling Account

First, the disclosures: Both my spouse and I have JetBlue frequent-flyer numbers already, but my kids didn’t yet. So this process involved setting up accounts for the two of them before linking the accounts.

That said, I still went into this thinking I could get through it in 15 minutes. Nope. The set-up process was moderately frustrating and required a call to customer service. After 20 minutes on hold being transferred between departments, a cheerful customer service agent worked some backend magic that allowed me to finish the process and even receive points from a family flight we took last year but that I hadn’t yet claimed (strike one more thing off the to-do list).

What I Wish I’d Known Before Setting up a JetBlue Family Pooling Account

Here are the things that would have saved me time and lessened my frustration while setting up the linked family points account:

Get everyone’s TrueBlue accounts in order first: Don’t try to set up new frequent-flyer accounts for kids and set up your family pool on the same day, unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time on hold.

You’ll need a different email for each person: Yes, even kids. To set up a TrueBlue account, you need to attach a unique email address for each person. Clearly my two kids under six do not have email addresses, so I had to spread the accounts out over my various email addresses. JetBlue labels these as accounts for children, so it’s weird that they still require an email account that’s different than the main account holder’s account.

Make sure your additional adult has completed their profile: My spouse hadn’t fully completed his TrueBlue profile, and I could not add him to my family pool until he added his date of birth (since there are restrictions on the number of adults and kids you can pool on one account).

There’s an additional step: After you set up the JetBlue Family Pooling account on the airline’s website, you’ll need to log out and log back in as each child (assuming, you, like me, are using your different email accounts for the kids’ TrueBlue accounts), then go to the family pooling part of the website, locate the invitation you have just sent to each account and put the earning of current and future points as 100 percent for the pooling account.

The interface gets better once you’re set up. Now, to add to our family pool of points, we just need to make sure all our TrueBlue numbers are linked to each ticket we book. Then they’ll automatically go into our shared pot of points. That’s easy earning.

More from SmarterTravel:

• JetBlue Mint Review: What Flying JetBlue Mint Is Really Like
• Best in Travel: The 2017 SmarterTravel Editors’ Choice and Readers’ Picks Winners
• 10 Dirty Little Secrets of Frequent Flyer Programs

Follow Christine Sarkis on Twitter @ChristineSarkis and Instagram @postcartography for more advice about making every vacation the best vacation.