I travel for work a lot and today I needed to book a flight for three consecutive days in early December when I’ll fly from New York to Washington, D.C. to Fort Lauderdale and back to New York.
I began with my darling JetBlue and immediately hit a snag with their Multi-City booking option, shown in this squashed screencap.
Was I missing something? How was I supposed to add the third and final leg of my trip with this interface? I called JetBlue, begrudgingly because I get double frequent-flyer miles when I book online. An agent named Barry booked my flights and at the end of the call, I asked him to reveal the secret of using the Multi-City option on JetBlue.com.
After checking with a supervisor, he told me what I needed to have done was book the first two legs of my trip using the Multi-City option, then separately book the final leg. He admitted this wasn’t intuitive, didn’t make sense to him and could have been improved. Words of wisdom from Barry, who ended up awarding me double-points even though I’d made the reservations with him.
As the web-wonks at JetBlue must know, improving this interface is doable. Travelocity, which I use sometimes, has a very intuitive Multi-Destination feature, at least for trips of four legs or fewer, shown here in a screencap. After you enter all of your legs, it even totals the cost of each possible full itinerary, which is one of the main reasons for even using a feature like this.
C’mon, JetBlue. I like everything else about you, particularly your personal televisions and potato chips; get cracking on your website. I guarantee other weary travelers have scratched their heads over this Multi-City confusion.