Happy 2003, everyone; I hope that those of you who celebrate Christmas enjoyed the holiday, and those of you who do not celebrate Christmas enjoyed a relaxing day off!

I was in California for the holiday, and I feel compelled to plug Jet Blue Airways now that I've returned. Flying for the first time on this small, no frills airline left me with a great feeling, and I have five reasons that I will fly with them again (none of which have to do with their fantastic price):

1. The DirectTV in each seat. It was nice to be able to watch this episode of Trading Spaces and the real news on my flight. You can keep the headsets, and they also encourage you to bring your own, which I would recommend--the headsets they provide are not particularly good. 

2. Jet Blue flies out of Terminal B at Dulles, which is much less crowded and smaller than the other big terminals.  Since this is where I live, this is significant. 

3. Jet Blue flies into Oakland International Airport in the Bay Area rather than SFO--and this is a non-stop flight from Dulles. Additionally, they fly into Long Beach rather than LAX, also non-stop. That shaves at least a few hours off of the flight time, and is difficult to do without flying one of the "bigs."

4. No-hassle pricing--flight prices are relatively constant, whether you're booking six weeks or six hours in advance of your flight.

5. Great customer service. My return flight from Oakland was initially delayed for two hours (the plane was late departing from NYC). When I arrived at the gate, they apologized and directed me to a table with sodas, juice, water, and snacks for their inconvenienced passengers. When the plane came into the Bay Area but had to be diverted to San Jose because of weather problems, the gate agents provided all of us with lunch vouchers. Now, neither of these things are particularly expensive or particularly overwhelming, but it was just a nice touch. The kicker, though, was when the plane was unable to depart from San Jose (same weather problems)--at this point, the captain came onto the loudspeaker in the gate area to announce that Jet Blue was providing each of the passengers with a free flight segment to be used on a future flight. In my case, if I fly to California again, that's about $150.

The thing is, this was all for a weather delay--there was NOTHING the airline could do about the fog and heavy rain in Oakland. And normally, a four-hour delay on a flight would result in a mass of disgruntled travellers. Instead, the stellar service provided by Jet Blue's gate personnel resulted in many new loyal customers. (I even brought the gate agents some snacks from one of the terminal restaurants as a thank you for keeping us so well informed; granted, I purchased the snacks with the Jet Blue meal-voucher, but still...)

So yes. There's my plug for Jet Blue. And their rewards program is called True Blue, which is clever enough to make me smile, and you can submit requests for retroactive credit online (unlike the "fill this out and mail it in" forms for some other airlines).  All of that said, they have a relatively limited market, but if you live in one of their cities, check them out.

Watch tomorrow for an update on the InformedElectorate project...