Trip Report: Portugal

Booking

My boyfriend’s first credit card was a CapitalOne card, and he had a ton of points that we had yet to use. Since we were paying for economy seats, I decided to combine all his points + cash to buy our tickets to Lisbon.

Overall, we booked SFO – JFK – LIS (one-way) and paid 82,955 CapitalOne Miles + $1,107.65 USD total for both tickets. Dropping that much cash for a one-way economy ticket was kind of painful — even though our last business class flights cost a TON of points, at least the fees were low.

Boarding

We arrived at SFO around 9am for flight to JFK, our first leg on our journey to Portugal.

JetBlue uses the international terminal at SFO, so we found the JetBlue counters. My boyfriend is a JetBlue Mosaic, so we were able to use the priority lane, where there was no line.

Thanks to TSA PreCheck and CLEAR, we made it through security in a few minutes. We headed to the AirFrance / KLM Lounge (which I previously reviewed), thanks to Priority Pass.

At around 10am, we headed to the gate, since we didn’t have seats. I noticed on ExpertFlyer that the last rows of both Even More Space and regular economy were blocked. I was hoping for the former.

We headed to the gate agents, who were super friendly and printed us our boarding passes. They also added my JetBlue number to my ticket, and they told us that we could both board with priority boarding, since one person on the reservation was Mosaic. Nice!

Then I checked our seats, and saw we had been assigned seats in the last row of Even More Space (JetBlue’s Economy Plus). Yessss 🙌

At around 10:45am, the gate agents called boarding for Mint class and Mosaic members.

August 30, 2017
JetBlue 416
SFO – JFK
Depart: 11:29 AM
Arrive: 8:18 PM
Duration: 5hrs, 30mins
Seat: 10A

After passing through the Mint cabin, we found ourselves in the Even More Space cabin.

The seats in this cabin have Even More Space printed on the headrest.

The seats in Even More Space have 4-8 extra inches of legroom. We were very comfortable on this flight.

All seats are equipped with seatback entertainment.

However, I found that the entertainment content was a bit dated. It didn’t really matter to me, since I had a ton of podcasts queued up for the flight. I kept the screen focused on the flight map.

Since JetBlue uses the International terminal at SFO, there was some nice planespotting.

We pushed back from the gate at around 11:30, but there was a long queue for takeoff.

Finally, we were airborne at around 11:50am.

 

The captain informed us that our flight time would be about 5 hours. There was no meal service, though the flight attendants did walk around with food for sale.

I usually bring my own food and a big bottle of water, though they kept us well hydrated throughout the flight.

I listened to a few podcasts and before I knew it, we were nearing New York.

Landing at JFK offered nice sunset views:

We landed right at 8PM and parked at a gate 22 within Terminal 5, which was conveniently the same terminal as our next flight to Lisbon.