Dear JetBlue

Dear JetBlue,

You wasted thirty minutes of my time yesterday, and I wouldn’t have spent another second thinking about it, but when I mentioned this little incident to my girlfriend, she cried “OMG! That happened to me too. I thought I was losing my mind!”

So, armed with an ally, I know that this problem is bigger than me, and deserves a simple solution, which only YOU can implement. Here goes.

Your confirming email messages all have the same subject line, which is “Itinerary for your upcoming trip.” At first glance this might seem like a perfectly acceptable subject line, except that most of us that travel, travel a lot. And, if you (JetBlue) are doing your job, we travel frequently on your airline.

So what makes this such a terrible subject line? Let me set the stage with a little background.

Most of today’s modern email clients (such as the very popular Gmail, have you heard of it? It’s made by a company called Google!), thread email messages, so that email conversations back and forth about the same subject, can be easily seen together.

What that means is that ALL my JetBlue confirm emails (and those sent me by visiting family members, such as my daughter who lives in Boston, and comes to visit me in San Diego) are threaded (or stacked) behind one message. When I saw the preview snippet of this threaded email, I saw my daughter’s name, and quickly assumed this thread was ONLY about her upcoming Thanksgiving visit. Not about the east coast trip I am taking in ten days.

So, I think … hmmm… maybe I didn’t book with JetBlue. I search for Orbitz confirms, I go to the Orbitz site… I shuffle through my paper files, looking for a printed confirm. I start to think I forgot to make these reservations at all! I am in a complete panic.

But then I visit the JetBlue site, and find my confirmation number. Now armed with a unique piece of data, I search my email again, and find the pesky confirm email HIDING in plain site behind all those other confirm messages that I had assumed were about my daughter’s trip.

Dear JetBlue: I have a simple suggestion. Please include the destination city and the date of the outbound flight in your subject lines. Sincerely, Barbara J. Feldman

Orbitz does this. Even Southwest, who only includes the destination city, not the date of travel, does it better than “Itinerary for your upcoming trip.”

So, what do you think? Jetblue are you listening?