Jet Airways’ JetPrivilege program has been reinventing itself over the past few months. First, there was a rehash of the earn and burn rates for mileage. While earn rates went up to a minimum of 500 JP Miles, burn rates went upwards as well.

JetPrivilege has now launched a family pooling feature of miles, called MyFamily+. As a part of a family account, you can now pool the miles of your family members to redeem for tickets on Jet Airways and their partners. However, to be able to join a family account, you should be an immediate family member of the person who is nominated to be the Head of Family.

Salient features of the new setup are:

• Between 1 to 7 immediate family members can be added to the Family account
• JetPrivilege charges the head of family with 1000 JPMiles to activate the family account feature, and 250 miles for addition of every member to the family account. Even when you want to leave the family club, the initiator of the request (HoF or member) will be charged with 250 Miles to leave the group.
• Each Member of the Family including kids & Head of the Family, continues to remain as an individual JetPrivilege members for accruals / redemptions / transfers of JPMiles from their respective JetPrivilege membership accounts.
• The eligible members of the family (with respect to the Head of the Family) are: Parents, Spouse and Children.

At this time, only JP account holders with an Indian account will be able to sign up for this family relationship. Also, verification will be done before the accounts are linked to each other.

How does the pooling work?

When people join in the family club, their miles will remain in their own accounts. However, the Head of Family can pool their miles into his/her account, which means they will be transferred under his account (debit from member of family account and credit to HoF account). This transfer cannot be reversed at a later time. This process is not automatic and needs manually pushing the buttons by the HoF to pool the miles. Only then will the miles transfer oneway happen. Redemption will be done as usual once the miles are pooled in, and depends on the availability in the program.

Pooling works only for redeemable miles, not for status earning. So if you think you could merge the tier points in 4 accounts to make one platinum account, not happening!

How does this benefit you?

Frequent flyer programs from time to time allow you to pool miles from your family members, such as Air India which allows pooling of miles with your spouse, and the now defunct Kingfisher airlines. Etihad also has a Family account feature, however, the number of miles you earn in the family account is lesser than those earned in the individual account.

Benefits are that you can use the miles of the entire family to get a redemption ticket in case you don’t fly as much, and hence you reduce the breakage of miles in the various accounts.

Should you do it?

I wouldn’t recommend jumping into it immediately, since you’d be set off by a couple of thousand miles in this case if you linked a few accounts together. Do it if you have several accounts with small mileage amounts in them.

Related Posts:

• JetPrivilege changes mileage earning w.e.f. August 1, 2014
• Jet Airways enhances domestic redemptions, guts international premium redemptions across network w.e.f. September 1, 2014

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