Redeem Emirates Skywards Miles For JetBlue Mint

I'm not sure if the statement about "I" class inventory being available to Emirates is 100% accurate. I booked in October for a December 2021 Mint flight from LHR-JFK. I needed two Mint award seats. I check on Expert Flyer and it showed plenty of "I" class nearly every flight, however Emirates only would allow me to book 1 seats. It appears Emirates only gets 1 "I" class seat per flight. I booked the one and waited to see if another would open up which it didn't and then had to fork over $2K for a business class ticket for the other seat. From what I can tell, availability for 1 "I" seats is "excellent" but not if you want to book another seat or travel with someone.

@ Todd -- Thanks for the data point, sorry to hear about your experience. Were you booking online or by phone? Many of the flights I'm pulling up show six or more business class award seats per flight, so maybe something has changed since then?

I use Skywards for JFK-LAX-JFK flights in Mint a few weeks back. B6 wanted more than $1200 each way so it was a decent deal in my case. However, I wasn't able to book them online, I was able to search out space on Expertflyer (IIRC 6 seats were available in each case) and I called them over the phone and booked with no issues.

Not sure if this applies to B6 bookings but there was (probably still is) an EK website bug when booking EK award flights online. They have (or had last year) a comparison bug.

When booking a 100k award you were not able to book it online if you had exactly 100k miles in your Skywards account. You would need more. I assume 100k + 1 point would be enough but I transferred in 1k more credit card points and was then able to book the award online. With only the exact number of points in my account I was not able to book it online. With more than the required number of points I was able to book it online. This does not appear to be a limitation when calling in, online when booking an award on the EK website. This was for an EK award but I assume it would apply to all online bookings through the EK website.

Thanks for this info. Even at 64k it's still cheaper than what JetBlue wants to charge for the flights I'm looking at in Mint. 105,000 - 120,000 for each way vs. the Skywards of 64k each way. Of course, I'll have to contend with the many month wait for Skywards Audit, but I guess I'll start now.

The screenshot you have for the LHR-JFK flight is booking into D - isn't award availability only in I?

Ben, if you redeem EK miles for one of the London Mint Suite flights, can you then call B6 and pay for an upgrade to a Studio?

Perhaps things have changed or they had restrictions during the month of December. I did book online but I even called them and the agents advised the same thing of only 1 seat being available for redemption even though EF showed more. Maybe it was a bug that is now fixed.

@ John Spear -- I haven't booked an award like this myself, but I think that should be possible. The Mint Studio is essentially reserved the same way as any other premium seat, and those can typically be reserved when on a ticket issued by another airline.

@ bill -- Good point! Best I can tell JetBlue only sells "D" fares for one-way tickets (even though the "I" fare class is available), so it's not a totally fair comparison. My main point though is that the cheapest one-way fares seem to be $2,500ish.

@ mjonis -- Hopefully no audit! For what it's worth, they do seem to have slowed down a bit with those audits, so hopefully that continues to be the case.

So if we were searching for B6 availability on, say, ITA for LHR-JFK in Mint, would it make sense to search roundtrip in I, even if we only wanted a one-way?

Looks like these are only showing up through the end of March. Errors out thereafter. Maybe a 60 day advanced window to book?

Thanks for the reminder. I found my flight I needed LAX-JFK and booked it right away. Contacted Emirates for Jetblue record locator and guess what, it's not working. UGH. Trying Jetblue's text feature to see if I can sort it out. Throne seats are wide open and I need to snag them.

I booked the end of May yesterday.

I did successfully book without calling 6 months ago, I think I used the app instead?

Is this still working? I've been searching across multiple routes and multiple dates and keep getting the message that they can't price the selected itinerary.