As an HP (now US) employee, I usually try to travel to Hawaii at least every 2 years. In the past, America West never had Hawaii service so I had to non-rev on other airlines usually out of LAX/SFO which meant your boarding priority is lower than the employees of the operating airline. I have never had trouble getting to Hawaii it was always leaving Hawaii that is a problem. My last Hawaii trip in 2004 was the worst Hawaiin non-rev trip I had encountered. I usually schedule my vacations around Sept. 11 dates because many travelers still have the fear factor with flying on that date. Anyway, I flew on Northwest from LAX to HNL on 9/11/2004. I had no problem non-reving as the flight was half empty. I was in Hawaii for 9 days. Anyway, my plan was to leave HNL on a Sat evening get to LAX or SFO the next morning and take the next HP flight to back to PHX. I left LIH Sat evening got to HNL where I had to reclaim my luggage from the interisland hop (Just an FYI-- Aloha and Hawaiin will not provide interline baggage transfer for non-revs) and recheck with my intended non-rev flight on UA. But before I checked in w/UA I had to get my luggage go through the agriculture check. Anyway, my plan was to non-rev on the first red-eye flight from HNL-LAX which was a 777 aircraft. Before I left LIH I called UA which took forever to get through at res. When I did I must have been speaking to one of their outsource res agent who told me the flight did not look good. But said their was 2 HNL-LAX, 2 HNL-SFO, and 1 HNL-DEN all back to back flights within 45 minutes of each other. Long story short we kept getting bumped off each one after being rolled over on each one. The flights were not oversold with paying passengers, but there were several UA non-revs. Each flight there were some UA non-revs getting on each flight. My partner and I had to end up staying at a motel in HNL that evening. The next day the first morning flight was HNL-SFO. The gate agent said are chances were looking very good as there were 25 seats open. After boarding all paying passenger, they called all the non-revs which were mostly UA employees. Soon my partner, myself, and a non-rev were the last one's standing at the gate. Then out of the blue 3 paying passengers showed up running to the gate, we end up getting bumped. Then they rolled us over the HNL-LAX flight that was departing the next hour where we finally got on after being bumped 6x. My luggage got on the orginal HNL-LAX I had listed for. I learned my lesson the hard way that I will never try non-reving again on a Sat. evening when most people want to get home with enough time to rest before returning to work on Mon. Anyway, with America West now going to Hawaii I am planning on going to Maui. At least I know what my priority status will be and I can check internally with the PBT's on the flights.