Jet Airways’ Upgrade Vouchers have been long on the wishlist of everyone. I’ve met all sorts of people wanting to take one off my hand, and on the other hand, I’ve also been at the receiving end of the generosity of readers who sometimes don’t have travel planned and hence they want to pass along their vouchers to me. I usually give them away to another reader, except for once this last month where someone only contacted me three days before expiry and I did have travel come up. Shipra was able to use the voucher on her way back from Hyderabad to Mumbai.

Now, the part where these vouchers were all paper was, of course, nice to some and irritating to many. Paper Vouchers have been the pain in the backside of loyalty programs and customers for a very long time. Like you feel you had a lovely meeting, and you want to treat yourself to an upgrade but did not bother carrying the vouchers. Meh. Or, you lost your vouchers, and someone else used them. Meh Meh Meh.

Air India had significant issues with vouchers, so their way out was to make them non-transferable. Vistara started with paper vouchers, moved to digital vouchers soon after.

So it was only logical that Jet Airways did something to move these vouchers digitally. Except, for whatever reason, it was not on the highest priority list of the airline for the longest time. Now, they’ve prioritised it and are all set to launch electronic upgrade vouchers in the coming week.

JetPrivilege is going live with a new do-it-yourself upgrade process on October 12, 2018. This means you no longer need to speak to an agent to process an upgrade. You can do the miles or voucher-based upgrade yourself.

Introducing Jet Airways eVouchers

Effective October 12, 2018, upgrade vouchers will cease to exist as physical documents and will be replaced by eVouchers. On October 12, 2018, all unutilized upgrade vouchers will be credited with eVouchers in the ‘My JP Wallet’ section of their JetPrivilege account, along with the expiry date of the original physical vouchers. Thereon, upon tier review, members will be issued a new set of eVouchers depending upon their tier attainment criteria

If you have any vouchers you’ve handed out to family or friends as a physical voucher, it will be useless, and you will need to transfer the digital voucher to them again. If you have a physical voucher which you’ll present to Jet Airways across the counter, it will not be accepted by Jet Airways October 12 onwards.

An upgrade voucher can only be transferred once. Which means if you transfer it to your family and they are unable to use it, it doesn’t come back to you. So be very careful with the transfers before you check availability. Transferred upgrade vouchers will retain their original validity date.

Online upgrades using miles & vouchers

On the other hand, Jet Airways + JetPrivilege are also transitioning the upgrade process online. If there is upgrade available space, you just will be able to claim it with miles or vouchers right away on the website rather than have to call the contact centre, then carry the vouchers to the airport. That also means your booking is no longer in limbo after a successful or waitlisted upgrade, and you are going to be able to check into the reservation right away.

If you want to use the miles or vouchers at the airport for an upgrade, you’d be able to give the agent a secure OTP generated on the spot to be able to deduct the vouchers from your account.

Nothing else changes

There are no other changes apart from the process going digital, which would mean that you will continue to get five vouchers for Platinums, 3 for Gold and 1 for the Silver tier. Also, the ranges or eligibility for upgrades stay as they were before. Of course, you cannot now freely hand out the vouchers because if you do, you cannot have it back. But let’s say you have a journey where you had to reschedule before the trip and the upgrade is no longer usable, then you get the voucher/miles back into your account within 72 hours.

I reached out to JetPrivilege, who told me that anyone who qualified over the past ten days will directly get their vouchers in the e-wallet, and won’t get a paper voucher anymore. They’ve also issued FAQs to walk you through the process.

I will, of course, write a step-by-step post on how to use the vouchers once the new process goes live.

Bottomline

This is a great move from Jet Airways, and a long time coming. I am happy this finally happened because this now allows people to use their vouchers when they need to rather than when they carried them. The previous process was slightly tedious in today’s age, especially because the airline or the program did not assume any responsibility for the vouchers to go missing, and hence you had to be very careful about handling them.

What do you think about the new changes to the JetPrivilege / Jet Airways Upgrade Vouchers?