Family Pooling

Keeping It All in the Family

What's Family Pooling

Family pooling is an original twist on sharing airline rewards with people in your family. Many airlines will allow spouses to transfer or share miles together if you can provide you have the same name, but JetBlue's pooling program allows you to establish a family with anyone you consider family - whether or not you're related. You can all pool points to more easily book reward flights for free and plan a vacation with ease. In addition, it's another badge for your collection once you have your first family member join you!


 

Who Counts?

A family consists of up to two adults, up to five children (under 21), up to three lap infants, and up to three pets. The other adult in your family does not have to be related - currently I have my girlfriend as the other adult in my family group. This is a large departure from what most industry standards accept since you could pool points with a partner, friend, sibling, literally anyone. 

Program Details

The way the program works is that members can choose to allocate amounts of their points to the family. Once someone's points go to the family, the head of household (who created the family) then has access to the sum of the points.  The head of household can book flights, GetAway trips, etc. for the family members with the pool of points. Members of a family can choose an initial transfer amount when they join and then a percentage of future points earned that will be added to the family account. The minimum amount you can set to transfer to the family is 10 percent of TrueBlue points earned.

One of the best parts of this program is that there are no balance or transfer fees for points. Transferring miles for other programs, like Delta, results in you paying as much as you would if you just bought the miles. By using family pooling you can transfer True Blue points for free. A huge advantage if you have someone to pool rewards with. 

There are, however, some restrictions. You can only be in one family group at a time. You can only change your contribution percentage twice a year, once on the birthday of the family group creation and another time at your choosing. 

If the Family Breaks Up

If for whatever reason a member wants to leave the family, they are free to do so. All points contributed to the family, however, remain with the family and the person is not able to join another family for 365 days. The family which now has a vacancy, however, is free to fill its spot with a new person anytime. 

Best Use Case

This is truly ideal for traveling with a partner or your family effectively. A friend, partner, or entire family can easily boost their available points by combining the thousands of TrueBlue points that are low hanging fruit for getting through the badge program. 

If you're more interested in traveling alone, it could be worth finding a friend to sign up for the program and transferring the 1,000+ points they can accumulate in less than a half hour through social media badges as well - the effectively free transfer of points is too good of an opportunity to miss for anyone. And if you have a family to travel with, the benefits are obvious. It's easier to book, plan, and keep rewards combined rather than having to book separately with each adult to maximize the use of points towards free and cheaper airfare. 

Just another amazing, cutting edge program that JetBlue offers to make travel easier, more enjoyable, and back to what is most important: getting where you want to go.

- John