Review: JetBlue Even More Space Seat A320 (ATL-BOS)

It has been awhile since I've flown a non-legacy carrier. I was supposed to fly JetBlue last year on my way to review Tailwind Air, a seaplane you can take from downtown New York to Boston Harbor. Due to multiple unforeseen circumstances, I had to cancel my JetBlue flight and was left with some flight credit. It was due to expire at the end of this month, and rather than waste it, I decided to have a quick weekend in Boston.

Booking

My cancelled flight credit was $217, and this flight came out to about the same price. My economy seat cost $200 for the round trip to Boston and back, then I spent an additional $40 to upgrade my seat each way to the extra comfort seats.

Check-in

The JetBlue app pushes you to use mobile check-in and bypass the lines as much as possible. Unless you are checking in a bag, there's really no reason to go to the counter unless you need special handling.

One of the perks for the Even More Space seats is priority security, however this is not offered in Atlanta and even if it was JetBlue does not place these priority security lines at the PreCheck lanes, so would be useless for someone like me.

The Seat

I have to say, I am pretty impressed with the Even More Space seats. Compared to the extra comfort seats usually offered by the legacy carriers, these feel a bit bigger and more spacious, even on an aging A320.

However, for an aging A320, it was showing some signs of its true age. My IFE screen was broken and would not light up whatever I or the flight attendant did. Thankfully, I ended up with the entire row to myself upfront and just moved to the middle seat to watch. When the IFE is working, there is live TV, and on-demand movies and TV shows.

Not to mention, the Wi-Fi was free, which kept me occupied during the flight.

Besides the IFE, the seats are basic, with only the safety card and a buy onboard menu of items that may or may not be available. I found out later that most buy onboard snacks are loaded on flights over 3 hours, which mine was just below that.

I did appreciate the multiple power sockets for charging devices, but I would like to see airlines start to invest into USB-C charging. Not only that, but I have been slowly moving everything I have to USB-C, and it would be nice to see them in the future.

Service

Service was lukewarm at best. My 11am flight arrived in from JFK, and presumably it was the flight attendant's first leg of the day on the inbound. However, I never did receive a hello or greeting as I entered the airplane.

And once in the air, there was not much of a warm hello or small talk as they passed out snacks. It was like they were there to do the bare minimum.

It took nearly an hour for service to get started, where they offered drinks and snacks separately. To their credit, I appreciate receiving my drink in a full can instead of a small cup. And their snack choices are very solid, the sea salt popchips are amazing.

I was confused by their service choices, they offered drinks first to the entire cabin then after they serviced the cabin with drinks, came around with snacks. This was quite awkward as I almost finished the entire can of soda before they could hand out snacks. I would like to see these handed out at the same time, or at least in more of a succession, so those who get their drinks first don't have to wait forever.

As the flight progressed, I started to hear yelping through my noise-cancelling headphones. At first, I thought it was a passenger, but when I took my headphones off, I saw it was a dog a lady across the seats had.

I had seen this dog when I was boarding, and it had barked a few times prior to closing the door. I was surprised that the flight attendants didn't say anything to the passenger prior to door closure. And it only got worse as we were flying, this animal was clearly in distress, barking non-stop. Neither the flight attendant nor the passenger did anything to try to calm the dog.

It was crazy that nobody said anything, especially as the dog kept barking. It was definitely not a service dog, and this passenger seemed unfazed, which was the most frustrating part.

The only thing keeping me distracted was the views out the window and my music in my headphones turned up to the max. It was a beautifully clear day on the technically Autumn day, even though it was still very warm outside.

Final Thoughts

The hard product that JetBlue offers is quite nice, even for their older A320 aircraft. I would still pay for the upgrade to the Even More Space seats. It was still unfortunate that my IFE screen wasn't working, but things like that happen, and there looked to be more than enough seats if I needed to move.

As for the crew and the service, I found it very lackluster. The crew seemed very disengaged to the passengers, was late to start service, and looked like they were doing the bare minimum. I will have to try them on a longer haul flight to really see how they are, but even for the short 2-hour flight, I was not impressed.