Don’t Trust JetBlue’s Flight Durations


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JetBlue recently went through a huge site redesign and I am personally not a fan. While it had many issues within the first few days of it launching, i.e., not even recognizing JFK as an airport, it still appears to have huge flaws. Just recently I was looking up flights from Boston to Aruba. I have a friend getting married there this Fall so I am being forced to take a 5 day vacation without my kids to visit this beautiful island and hang out with a ton of friends. Sounds pretty awful right?

Although I booked my JetBlue flights awhile ago, I periodically check the price to see if it went down. Fortunately my husband has Mosaic status so if a flight goes down in price, you get your money (or points) back – huge perk of having Mosaic. While the price pretty much doubled so there was no change of getting the points back in my account, I did notice that the flight times were all over the place. a screenshot of a flight scheduleIt looks like JetBlue is bringing back the Concorde and assuming a massive tail wind! While I wish one could fly from Aruba to Boston in just 57 minutes that will never never never happen. At least in my lifetime!

It does look like they’ve updated that flight time since I took the screenshot last week, there seems to be many inconsistencies with many of their routes. While clearly someone booking that Aurba to Boston flight knows that there is no way the flight is actually less then an hour, there are many routes that are off by an hour or so and I do not expect a traveler to know that. For example, this non-stop JetBlue flight from Boston to Cancun:

a screenshot of a phone

a screenshot of a phone

There is no possible way that this route has a 2 hour and 41 minute difference in each direction! In reality, the Boston to Cancun route should be around 4 hours and 45 minutes and the Cancun to Boston route should be around 4 hours and 15 minutes. There is no reason that the duration of this route should be off by so much, especially since both cities are in EST time zone! I know there are many families out there who cap the amount of time their kids are on a plane so being told a flight is 3 hours is very different then 4+ hours!

I actually did bring some flight duration issues to JetBlue’s attention back in 2017 and while they said they’d look into them (and I assume that meant fix!), it looks like nothing was done. And instead the new interface actually made it worse!

So my warning to you – when you book a JetBlue flight and the amount of time you are on a plane matters to you, make sure to double check the actual duration so you aren’t in for a big surprise!

 

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David
David
5 years ago

It is probably because daylight savings time is not observed in Cancun. They are on Eastern Standard Time all year, so during part of the year, there is an hour difference from Eastern Daylight Time. The logic that calculates the flight time probably does not account for this difference.

Pam
Pam
5 years ago

Noticed flight time issues back in March when my flight to Cancun was going to take less than an hour. My take was that they don’t seem to be considering time zones in their calculations. While Cancun is eastern time zone, they don’t participate in daylight savings. Obviously flight times are an ongoing jetblue issue. I too contacted jetblue but I got zero response.

Kumi Rauf
5 years ago

I just got off a jetBlue flight to Boston, the time to destination read 4:42 the entire time. Tripped me out when I woke up…

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