In late 2016, JetBlue and Amazon introduced a partnership that allows TrueBlue members to earn bonus points for shopping with Amazon.
Specifically, you’ve been able to earn three bonus TrueBlue points per dollar spent on Amazon purchases, either when using JetBlue’s unique Amazon link, or when making Amazon purchases inflight through JetBlue’s Fly-Fi service. Unfortunately there was no way to just save this partnership to your account, so you had to always follow the link when making purchases, which was a bit annoying, though still worth it.
I value TrueBlue points at ~1.4 cents each, so to me that’s the equivalent of a ~4.2% return on Amazon purchases, which is pretty significant, especially since it’s on top of the points you can earn through credit card spend at Amazon (and with some cards you can earn as many as 5x points for Amazon purchases).
Unfortunately it looks like this partnership has run its course, and will be cut back significantly. JetBlue has announced that as of March 27, 2018, they’ll no longer offer TrueBlue points for Amazon purchases not made on JetBlue flights. As of that date you’ll only earn 3x points for purchases made when logged in to JetBlue’s Fly-Fi service inflight.
This is a loss for many, given that it was a way to basically get “free” points for your Amazon purchases. It’s great that the partnership ever existed, though my guess is that like with many of these marketing partnerships, they felt they weren’t really generating incremental business, but rather were just offering rewards for purchases people would make anyway. They probably feel differently when people make purchases on a plane, since they may very well be bored and just decide to buy something.
This is the second unique airline partnership we’re losing in a fairly short time period. As of December 2017, Starwood and Uber discontinued their partnership, allowing members to earn Starpoints for their Uber rides.
Did you take advantage of the Amazon & JetBlue partnership? Are you sad to see it cut?
(Tip of the hat to Jacob)
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