Thread: Nonrev Tips

I think that's absolutely true for the employee, but for people like my father-in-law (generally used to buying the most convenient ticket, price isn't such a big deal) or my former-coworker's cousin (asking for buddy passes for a family of 5 to HNL) it's a lot to learn right away. Too many people think that every plane leaves with open seats.

Sometimes nonrev travel is a cruel thing to some passangers. Everyone want's a slice of the nonrev pie including non-employees and their families. I hate using them, but I have used them successully. Most recent, flew a brother out to Vegas when we went there. Told him if he made it out of his home airport, he would make it all the way to Vegas. If he missed that first flight out of Florida, to just forget about it. Well, shoot, I wake up the next day, and I see a series of text messages about him making it out, then laying over in Houston, and making it out and next thing I new, he was in Vegas on a shuttle on his way to the hotel we were staying. I quickly booked his room for three nights, covered his buddy pass. He flew back with us, stayed for a few days till his flight to Florida was open. I was glad he came, I was glad he left. Just like that. NONREV BUDDY PASSES, ya gotta love them.

Delta buddy passes are mostly worthless. Sometimes you can get good use from them though. I would never send people if I wasn't sure that they weren't going to make it both ways (and I'm talking with a pretty heavy buffer as well). One of my friends asked for a few buddy passes to HNL and I just laughed at him.

They have their place. UA gives us "extended family" buddy passes - draws from the same pool of buddy passes, but with a slightly cheaper fare and priority above the non-family buddies (but still below everyone else). I used that for my father-in-law to come visit. Like I said, he doesn't really have what I would normally consider the "heart of a nonrev" but the flights were good enough and we were conservative enough that it worked out pretty well. He drove out to MSN so he could get a nonstop to DEN, and got in just fine - almost had a seat in F, even. Going home, he could have made it out the next day as he would have liked, but if he didn't get on that, all flights for the next couple days were booked pretty full due to a football game that weekend (which he had tickets to). We sent him out a day early to be safe. He seemed to like the process overall though, and I think he'd do it again.

I think that going into a hub is pretty hard (lots of delays, carryover, etc) but if you start with the first flight of the day going out of a hub affected by bad weather, you should be good on at least one flight (barring cancellations, and hub-to-hubs may still be difficult with massive rebookings from other cancellations)

Yup, the optimism of the buddy pass rider.
You can tell them
they’ll be spending hours at the airport
they‘ll be bumped
they’ll be in a middle seat between sumo wrestlers,
their return date will have to be ”open” and you’ll be giving them a 24 hour “pack up notice“
their return flight will involve a roundabout route with at least one connection (which could be DFW)
and that bad weather anywhere on the planet will throw a monkey wrench in the entire operation
AND STILL they’ll want to fly to Hawaii for “free”.
Trust me, I paint a very dark picture when asked about passes.