How A Stupid Mistake Cost Me Thousands of Points

by joeheg

You live and you learn. That’s what we’re told whenever we make a mistake. It still doesn’t make the error any easier to swallow. Fortunately, most mistakes you make when dealing with points and miles will cost you extra points or prevent you from maximizing your earnings. In the big picture, not a huge deal but you still regret the mistake.

So when I realized I made a mistake when booking a flight with JetBlue which cost me 3,000 points, I beat myself up for about 10 minutes.

Triple Facepalm

One perk of having the JetBlue Plus credit card is getting a 10% rebate on your points redemptions.

When I needed to book a flight for Sharon on JetBlue, I didn’t have enough points in my account so I created a family pool. This gave us enough points for the ticket (once I topped off the account by transferring points from American Express).

When you pool your points, the point balance your pool shows up on every member’s page. Great. I had enough points so I logged into Sharon’s account and booked her award ticket.

tenor

There was my mistake. At the time, Sharon didn’t have a JetBlue Plus card. When I logged into her account and booked the ticket, we didn’t get the 10% points rebate. If I had logged into my account and booked a ticket for her (which is totally legal to do), I would have received 10% of the points back.

doh-1

Final Thoughts

Mistakes like this aren’t the end of the world. Figure I lost out on getting about $40 worth of points. Now that’s a chunk of cash that would make the sting of the card’s annual fee a little more bearable.

I’ll know better next time. You can’t win them all.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

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