Thread: Non-revenue travel policies on your airlines

It seems like this is very roughly the standard across the board:

Employees fly free, or at least really close to it (ZED Low, for example, which is pretty cheap)
Children, Parents, and Spouse (or registered travel companion for unmarried people) get the same benefits, sometimes at a lesser priority (especially for parents) and do not need to fly with the employee
A limited number of "buddy passes" can be issued to friends or other people traveling with you. These aren't free, but have their own rates. As an example, when I worked for Northwest, it cost my girlfriend about $300 to fly with me MSP-SEA-HNL-PDX-MSP.
Airlines also have agreements with other rates for standardized rate plans (ID90, ZED Low/Medium/High, flat service fees) which is reciprocated.

Hope something like that helps! I'm sure others can chime in with their own specifics

Originally Posted by FLYINGNC

We started a zed agreement few years ago however I feel we need to get more carriers on our agreement list.

I know some people in the pass bureau who are working very hard on that! Basically you attend a forum once (maybe twice?) a year to negotiate reciprocal agreements, and it has to be in the interest of both airlines. I hear at the moment it is a bit thin on the ground for agreements with asian carriers?

I know we used to have an agreement but it got suspended. I think the issue is a lot of foreign airlines would say OK, Southwest has a good network, but the spider network creates complexities in ticketing, and how many of our staff are going to use it when they can get on an allliance carrier direct from one of their intl destinations? For example I'm not sure how one would buy a ZED LAXDAL on WN...would you have to issue LAXABQ-ABQDAL, LAXHOU-HOULAX? Southwest has a lot of variables that other airlines don't have I guess. But I still fly them whenever I can

Longest nonrev I did on them was back in 07... DAL-HOU-ELP-LAX-OAK!

Alaska Airlines has great benefits. Employee/Spouse/Children/Parents all fly free anywhere Alaska flies. We have agreements with pretty much all airlines I could possibly think of either ZED or service charge pass. We have been getting guest pass/companion passes every year. If used as a guest pass, the person flying pays the cost. If used as a companion, the value is added as income (gotta love the IRS) and taxes are charged based on that.