Your root node doesn't have a customerSessionId, it has a HotelListResponse. Get that first.

//other methods
public void basicTreeModelRead()
{
    JsonNode innerNode = rootNode.get("HotelListResponse"); // Get the only element in the root node
    // get an element in that node
    JsonNode aField = innerNode.get("customerSessionId");

    //the customerSessionId has a String value
    String myString = aField.asText();

    System.out.println("customerSessionId is:" + myString);
}

This prints

customerSessionId is:0ABAAA7A-90C9-7491-3FF2-7E2C37496CA2

If you want to explicitly traverse through the json and find the value of a , you can do it like this for the json that you specified.

String aValue = jsonNode.get("text").get(0).get("a").asText();

Finding the value of b would be

String bValue = jsonNode.get("text").get(1).get("b").asText();

You can also traverse through the elements within the text array and get the values of a and b as

for (JsonNode node : jsonNode.get("text")) {
    System.out.println(node.fields().next().getValue().asText());
}

And that would print the below on the console

1
2

With Jackson's tree model (JsonNode), you have both "literal" accessor methods (get), which returns null for missing value, and "safe" accessors (path), which allow you to traverse "missing" nodes. So, for example:

JsonNode root = mapper.readTree(inputSource);
int h = root.path("response").path("history").getValueAsInt();

which would return the value at the given path, or, if the path is missing, 0 (default value).

But more conveniently, you can just use JSON pointer expression:

int h = root.at("/response/history").getValueAsInt();

There are other ways too, and often it is more convenient to model your structure as a Plain Old Java Object (POJO). Your content could fit something like:

public class Wrapper {
  public Response response;
} 
public class Response {
  public Map<String,Integer> features; // or maybe Map<String,Object>
  public List<HistoryItem> history;
}
public class HistoryItem {
  public MyDate date; // or just Map<String,String>
  // ... and so forth
}

and if so, you would traverse the resulting objects just like any Java object.

Provided that you have already read this object into JsonNode, you can do it like this:

String content = jsonNode.get("data").textValue();

UPD: since you're using a streaming parser, this example on Jackson usage might help.

UPD: the method name is now textValue() - docs