One of the Wolves

I decided to take some vacation time next week to go home as well as visit Vegas and some of San Diego. I had originally planned to take a red-eye out Friday night and take advantage of the weekend, but — a few days after I had booked my ticket — a coworker reminded me that Friday was Good Friday. In an attempt to try to get yet another day at home — a free day, one that wasn’t my vacation time — I went to jetblue.com to see if I could bump up my flight.

To my dismay, the total cost of changing my flight would have been slightly over $150. Although that’s more than I wanted to pay for an extra day home, I was able to find a few bugs simply by being a normal user.

Info button gives me the wrong information.
After logging into JetBlue’s site and telling them you’d like to change your flight details, you are presented with this screen. This screen shows you your current flight details, and gives you the ability to specify anything you want to change:

Notice that in my departing flight, I had checked a box saying that I wanted to change my departing flight. Being the inquisitive customer that I am, I wanted to know just what it meant to change my flight — and if I could. I decided to click on the question mark icon next to the “Change” check box in order to get more information. After doing that, I was presented with this message:

There’s a few important things to note in this message. First, it tells me that I’m changing the flight going from Portland to New York. Second, it tells me that this flight is on March 30th. Neither of those are what I wanted to change, and that information doesn’t seem to match up with the information next to it. In fact, it seemed to be the information about my returning flight. After looking into it further, clicking question mark icon within the Returning Flights section — the one next to “Change” — gave me the same information that the previous message gave me. Oops.

Okay, so the first one’s a bit superficial. Yes, it may confuse users, but it’s not horrible. The next one, however, could possibly be damaging.

I can change my flight to the exact same flight I’m currently on, at the hefty cost of $150+
After clicking through the site and looking at my options, it didn’t seem cheap enough for me to change my flight one day earlier. Instead though, I thought it may be cheaper is I just change my flight to earlier in the day. (I was going to take a red-eye; an earlier flight would be a bit nicer). I decided to click through their site and search for flights available the same day I was leaving. This is what I was presented with:

If you look closely, the only option that it gives me for changing my flight is the exact same flight I’m currently on! Apparently, the only flight that’s leaving Friday, that’s also available, is my current flight. If I wanted to, I could pay Jet Blue $150+ for no increase in service. Great.
I decided not to test any further because of the effect it might have on my bank account, so this may only be in the user interface. Being optimistic, I would hope that JetBlue would prevent you from simply throwing you’re money at them (JetBlue’s a good company right?). Being a tester though, I can’t be sure until I try it.

Bugs