JetBlue have just put their flights between London and New York on sale. Yesterday, I unveiled the flight schedule and I had an interesting comment on Facebook about the business class pricing.
The person said, “£1000 return from LHR to JFK in Oct!!! Can’t see people rushing out to book that.” With that, I thought it might be useful to see if the fare is good value or not.
Is JetBlue Mint Good Value?
Clearly the person writing that comment thinks that £1,000 return in business class (which JetBlue call Mint) is paying over the odds. Let’s look at a straight comparison then, shall we?
Overall Thoughts
These are exceptionally good fares for transatlantic business class. When British Airways and American Airlines have their annual sales, the prices will usually come down to £1,200 return at best. You can save a little more sometimes by booking out of other European cities, but the overall cost when connections are factored in comes out pretty much the same.
£990 out of Heathrow and £950 out of Gatwick are both excellent fares. I also checked Virgin Atlantic and they come up at £2,690 return as well, the exact same as BA and AA. Ain’t competition great? On the lounge issue, it is entirely possible B6 will contract a lounge, so that may also be something that comes on stream in due course.
These JetBlue fares are only on sale at these low prices through to 25 May, and they are for travel between 11 August and 18 November. At least, that’s what my translation of the American backwards dates of 8/11 to 11/18 on JetBlue’s website gives me.
What do you think of these new JetBlue transatlantic airfares? Will you be making a booking at these rates? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Vincenzo Pace.
not sure if this is intentional but your comparison appears to be based on matching one way fares, which is not how BA or other airlines price (they severely penalize for one way bookings). The difference for typical day is around USD $1,000 on the return booking. If based in UK it depends on your other travel patterns and whether you have a love-hate or hate-hate relationship with BA. Doesn’t take too many US-UK return flights to have middling status and gain lounge access on all BA flights, including cheap weekend trips to EU. It does add up. For US-based flyers asked to shell out $750+ for annual access to truly horrible lounges, jetblue may seem attractive. Don’t expect it will last. If Jetblue doesn’t play nice and pay tribute to join trans-atlantic JV, good luck finding viable code shares to LHR or JFK for translantic flight. Mint is likely to look more and more like club world over time.
Perhaps I have caused some confusion there. When doing a flight booking on the British Airways website, I searched LHR-JFK outbound 6 October, return 13 October. I stitched together two of the many outbound prices and two of the many inbound prices to make one image. The return flights are pricing up at £2,690. This is not one putting two one way flights together, it is a standard return journey. I imagine how I did the image file is what has caused some confusion here.
If you look at the JetBlue pricing outside of the sale window, so after November 2021, it is a little more at about £1,200 or so return. It is still far below the BA pricing. That being said, this is one example on one route. It’s perfectly possible to get a fare out of a European city for about £1,000 return on BA if you try hard enough. But that solution is only for hardcore frequent flyers, not really for your average punter looking to head to New York for a long weekend of shopping. This is where JetBlue will do very well, I imagine!
Thanks very much for the comment.