American and JetBlue announced new flights and are now codesharing out of New York and Boston. But there’s more to the story than has been reported, based on internal documents reviewed by View From The Wing.
American loaded its codeshare flights into the Sabre computer reservation system on Sunday, February 14 – but didn’t offer any inventory. The flights were closed for sale for testing. You can now book these flights for travel starting February 25. The early load of these flights suggests that the codesharing announcement may not have been pushed up because JetBlue’s pilots rejected a deal to fully implement the partnership, as reported on Tuesday.
We don’t know yet what the mileage earning and burning relationship will look like – you cannot earn AAdvantage miles for all JetBlue flights, and can’t use AAdvantage miles to redeem for travel on JetBlue yet (and vice versa).
However traveling on JetBlue flight marketed as an American Airlines flight (codeshare) will earn American redeemable miles and elite qualifying miles. So far they aren’t promising more. According to an internal document,
This new partnership provides AAdvantage customers with more flexibility when it comes to network, as well as the ability to earn AAdvantage miles and elite qualifying points when purchasing and flying on AA marketed flights.
You can book a single ticket combining American and JetBlue flights through either airline. This isn’t always advantageous – the fare may be higher if you do it – but it’s an option.
Here are the markets where American and JetBlue are codesharing, but note that you cannot buy every route as either an American or JetBlue flight – some (not specified) can only be booked in conjunction with a connecting flight (so you might need an American Airline flight to Boston, for instance, to book an American Airlines codeshare on JetBlue on some of these flights).
American Airlines will be implementing “a Customer Pass Through (CPT)” with JetBlue to handoff customer service calls, with implementation targeted for Monday, February 22nd. This is useful if the American Airlines agent stays on the line and waits for the JetBlue agent, explaining the situation so the customer doesn’t have to start from zero (a ‘warm handoff’). If it’s just transferring the call to JetBlue rather than giving the customer JetBlue’s phone number that won’t be of much value.
Oh no! Lax-JFK mint does not seem to be on the list (fly b6 operated, earn AA), just fly a AA operated plane on a B6 codeshare.
The chances are very high that the markets where a connection is required are high profile markets include BOS/NYC-MIA/FLL-LAX specifically because AA and B6 don’t want to compete against each other but rather to facilitate connections between themselves esp. since they can’t share revenues. If so, there will be competing for far more revenue in those local markets than they could possibly get via connections. Since they can’t jointly price, all it takes is another carrier esp. an ultra low cost carrier – to lower fares and all of this extra capacity which is being thrown in the market could backfire badly.
Let’s remember that AA and B6 did have a codeshare agreement before.
Whole situation remains very tentative, particularly with how they will handle premium cabin and basic economy.
A couple of data points from a random date in July:
“No valid ticketing agreement” for AA operated/B6 coded LAX-JFK nonstop
Premium cabin zeroed out on B6 operated/AA coded SFO-JFK nonstop
I still believe the integration/passenger utitlity of this partnership has a long way to go. These carriers position their products very differently in the market (particularly with B6’s latest basic econ changes), and remain fierece competitors that are going to heavily protect and seek to maintain control over their respective relationships with high value customers.
The AS/AA partnership is much more symbiotic.
I guess PVD is not included even though it is the BOS region?
On AA app, booking nonstop MSY-JFK-MSY is $257, Operated by Jet Blue, main cabin only available . That is not a flight with connecting international legs. AA has not had this nonstop for a minute, so it makes sense to offload it to compete with Delta at both LGA & JFK and United at EWR. And that’s just New Orleans, I wonder where else AA was lacking nonstop service that it just conjured. (Def no nonstop code share from MSY to LGA or more importantly BOS)
Seconding JaL, did some dummy bookings online and noticed that routes that are mentioned in the internal document as part of the codeshare (but not included in the public announcement) are up and bookable. For the moment it looks like no fare premium and codeshare flights are fully bookable without a connecting flight. Early days, and travel is down, but will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward!