Crewed Talk: The Mystery of How Airline Bookings Have Changed — and Why Crews Care

“More Than a Million People are Getting Free Flights — and They Hate It”

Do we? I know that’s how headlines work, but I feel it’s important to let you know that airline employees don’t actually take this privilege for granted. It’s still what attracts most of the talent and what keeps it here.

Crewed Talk has discussed pass travel before, which reflected that it has become more and more frustrating over the years, and this article did spark good discussions on that note. They all tend to say that it’s because flights are so much fuller. That’s definitely one issue, but there’s another current obstacle to pass travel that I haven’t seen addressed at all: ticket-buying behavior has become unpredictable — at least to us.

As the article mentioned, “non-rev” (or NRSA) flying is done in last-minute, unsold seats. This is how it has always been and, of course, is perfectly fair. This part has changed though: when I started flying in the late nineties, you could look at the passenger loads for an international flight about two weeks out to find where there were empty seats and make some travel decisions. You always needed back-up plans! But in those last two weeks, bookings probably wouldn’t change too much. A few seats here or there. Domestic bookings were always more turbulent, but not unfathomably so. A few flights would still fill up, but you could spot the trends, and predict how the numbers might behave in that last two weeks. You could also depend on school calendars to dictate a lot of the activity. These days, it seems all bets are off at predicting where there will be empty seats, year-round, even 24 hours in advance.

I first noticed this change abruptly, in 2009. My husband was in the U.S. and couldn’t join me in the U.K. until a couple days prior. It is a golden rule of NRSA travel that you never depend on it for super important things. I know this, but all the flights across the system were wide open. There were seats everywhere! So I did the naive thing and told him to use my passes.

Suddenly, just a few days before his trip, every flight I could get my eyes on sold out. It’s like I blinked and all the seats were gone. I even had trouble finding one to buy! After lots of searching I dug up a Coach seat on United for the price of a Business Class seat (but I suppose I deserved that).

Nine years later this experience… is not unusual. Very recently, over a holiday weekend (when I’d think people would really plan their travel), a route that had about loads of its seats unsold just 24 hours in advance ended up oversold. When I went to bed, everything looked fine. I even checked the flights from the previous day to make sure weather hadn’t caused any trouble there, leading to stranded passengers, and there was none. Still, when I woke up, all the open seats had disappeared.

Something happened, I just don’t know what — and that seems to happen a lot these days. So many of us are stumped on travel strategy for this new NRSA world. Do so many people really buy plane tickets at the last minute now? Are they hiding on some secret, last minute fire sale website? Are airlines simply re-routing passengers more creatively than before? Just reporting their figures differently on our internal websites? I can’t figure it out, and I’m not alone.

If you know, just whisper it! I promise I won’t tell.

There is another, very new problem on the landscape (at least at my airline) — of agents simply leaving us behind. Airlines have tightened boarding times, yet increased the pressure to shut the door on-the-dot, and agents say they’re running out of time to re-assign the empty seats, with their jobs on the line. This is a huge frustration for us, but not one management cares about in the slightest.

I don’t dwell on this here because it’s totally apart from passengers and, well, I’m kind of hoping you have insight on the question of current ticket-buying habits. It is worth mentioning, however, as another light on what a maze it can be to navigate our pass flying privileges in the current climate.

In trying to describe how using our passes has changed over the years, I always think of the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. While fuller flights do indeed shrink the space available to us, that’s not the only pressure. I would certainly never say we “hate” our travel privileges, but it would be nice if we could predict, at least a little, how to make them work.

[Photo: iStock]