my 23/J41 experience - BA staff travel


I recently did a trip to NYC on BA staff concession travel and not just 'normal' standby but using the annual 'free' 'Y ticket with J entitlement' that most BA staff have for use once a year.

I have thought long and hard about whether to write about the experience. My friend who made all this possibly has said I should and I have consulted with a few other wise people as well. I don't intend to review the flights much per se given they were pretty standard but wanted to write about my experience of this whole trip as it certainly was very different from anything I'd ever done before.

as a disclaimer or caveat, I am sharing some (not all) of the knowledge I have gained through this process as I think we are - as a community - about sharing such insights and even though most on here don't have 'access' to such travel, I personally was fascinated by how it all works. I hope I am staying on the right side of the balance of how much to share and I hope that any BA staff will not think that I am sharing stuff that shouldn't be shared in a public forum (though this has been written about before).

Anyhow, this was a while ago but here it goes.

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Through a number of people I know who work at BA, are married to someone at BA or even from on here who have connections with people who had added them to their concession travel, I was aware that BA staff (and the two nominated 'friends' they could add to their 'accoun't) had access to some great standby deals.

In fact, even as a kid, a friend of my parents worked for a different well-known airline and i was always fascinated that she and her husband would fly to Hawaii once a year or so in First Class for what I always believed was 10% or so of the real cost (maybe that's where my 'liking' of HNL comes from - Freud would probably have a field day here; one to bring up with the therapist).

in fact, two contacts of mine (a friend through work and another one I met through here) have often talked about ‘jumping on a flight’ to the Eastcoast for dinner with friends at fractions of cost so I had, in my mind, a notion of ‘wow, if only I could that one day as well’.

well, one day not long ago, a friend who works for BA casually mentioned that one of his two individuals who he had on concession travel hadn’t used it in years. this was in the context of him explaining hotline tickets to me (hotline tickets - as far as I understand - are relatively normal tickets that BA staff can buy for anyone (don’t need to be on their concession list) with a discount in the region of 10% or so). almost without initially realising it, i suddenly found myself being offered a place on my friends concession travel list - something which I had assumed was as coveted as gold dust and would involve marriage, parenthood or other things - more than a casual conversations about BA staff travel. having probably said half a dozen or so times ‘are you sure’ and ‘are you really really sure about this’, I of course accepted.

BA staff (or at least my friend) can only change names from BA computers and only once every 6 months (the latter not being an issue in this case) so it took a week or 10 days or so to get me added.

now, to take the ‘wow, I can’t believe this is happening’ a step further, my friend also - rather casually given in my books this was a pretty big deal - said ‘oh, btw, I won’t be using my annual free Club ticket so if you want it, it’s yours’. now, i think the first few things that went through my head were “you what?”. so he explained: ‘normal’ BA staff concession travel has 2 categories: standby and premium standby. prices vary by route but roughly speaking a Y to NYC would cost in the region of GBP 190 and a Premium Standby (i.e. for CW) in the region of GBP 390.

a couple of interesting things about that: BA is one of a few airlines (most don’t do this) that would upgrade a rev CW pax to F to make space for a staff on J standby; Y standby can lead to sitting on jump-seats (pretty sure I wouldn’t have allowed this - though not 100% sure). standby means standby: even a ‘confirmed’ seat can be pulled if there are IRROPS on the day and BA need the seat for a rev pax.

so, the reason why my friend didnt use his (doesn’t generally use standby travel) is that he prefers (naturally) a confirmed seat for holidays rather than the uncertainty of standby travel. he’s fully au fait with ex EU so says he’d rather do an ex EU than risk not starting the holiday for a number of days (worst case scenario depending on the route) because there have been issues and/or because the flights are full.

so, back to my situation. said ‘annual’ ‘free’ ‘confirmed Y with J entitlement’ ticket had to be used by a certain date and that date was 2.5 weeks later. I already had plans for the last weekend possible in the date range (a cheeky trip to HNL) so it was a case of ‘this upcoming weekend or never’.

this annual ticket has 23/J41 entitlement and higher priority than e.g. a ‘normal’ premium standby ticket. with the help of this friend and someone else I know at BA, we looked at a number of flights and loads - not just loads according to expertflyer but actual loads as well as where I would feature on the standby list. I toyed with 2 days in the sun in DXB or so but flights were very busy - one of them had 27 people on the standby list.

I toyed with visiting friends in SFO for dinner but again, flights were busy and flight times didnt work out (I couldn’t take either Friday nor Monday off). So NYC was the obvious choice - high frequency of flights and ok looking loads.

Having got stuck in NYC in the January snow storms and thus missing a day of work, I was a bit worried about getting stuck and joked about this with my boss in the office (he and the team think I am a bit crazy (as do most of my friends) but secretly, he’s ‘one of us’: he covets his Gold Card, treats himself to the occasional flight home on a Friday night ex LHR to enjoy GF (LCY is his normal route) and we have talked about a TP run for him in the past if he misses his 1,500 TPs (he commutes to London on a weekly basis).

Another aspect of being ‘torn’ was that I was meant to see friends in Ramsgate that weekend. But as my other BA-contact friend said to me “chris1979, are you serious? weekend in NYC or weekend in Ramsgate? and you are even thinking about it” - NYC won. I shall make up to the good people of Ramsgate at a future visit.

So on Thursday afternoon, via my BA friend, I ‘booked’ tickets to JFK departing on Friday evening returning Sunday evening. for a grand total of GBP 164.20.

My return flight on Sunday showed as ‘confirmed’ but my Friday flight showed as ‘waitlisted’ which apparently is normal for a booking that is created so close to departure. Apparently the system usually moves from ‘waitlist’ to ‘confirmed’ a few days in advance if the system thinks there will be empty seats.

So, I was booked. on a Thursday afternoon. to fly Friday evening. I don’t think I had been so excited / nervous / scared about an upcoming trip for quite some time. In fact, I think i kept on whatsapping my friend using the word ‘scared’.

My friend had given me ‘instructions’: travelling on staff concession meant: not taking any amenity kit (or PJs if in F), not asking for a new bottle of wine to be opened (i.e. only accepting stuff that’s open) (which given I don’t drink wasn’t going to be a problem), knowing that my meal order would be taken last, being prepared to move seats even on board if requested by the crew etc. Any bad behaviour could come back to his manager and thus him. Good job I am such a charming angel, as i told my friend and my mother tells me!

I was also wondering what it all would be like - I am sort of used to the ‘mr CIV98, what else can we do for you’ treatment (as un-demanding as I am irrespective of what the butler might say). how would crew interact with me? my other BA-contact friend told me that he tends to have a better time ‘bonding’ with crew when on staff tickets as crew are bit more relaxed with him. In fact, coming back from NYC a few months ago, going up the stairs to UD, I causally asked ‘ are you on back-to-backs’ to find the crew a bit guarded with me. in the morning, the steward came over and told me that he initially assumed i was crew when I used ‘crew language’ with him but after checking the manifest, he realised i was ‘the opposite of crew’.

Anyway, all this was going through my mind (as well as packing HBO with plenty of deo) etc on Thursday night as I tried to sleep. I had booked a decent hotel via ‘hotels tonight’ app so from a hotel point of view, was all set. fingers crossed there wouldn’t be any IRROPS on Friday - nor, worse, Sunday.

I had a busy day on Friday but I was able to build a break into my work day (mostly full of calls) to head to LHR for lunchtime to meet my friend who had just arrived from a trip.

There are a number of ‘special’ desks in T5 including ones of staff check-in / flight management.



I was waitlisted on an evening flight to JFK but the agent asked if I wanted to go on an earlier flight. there were a few options but given I still had a few work calls, only the 4pm would really work. So my friend and I went to another bank of desks (that I had never seen - behind check in areas) to change my flight to an earlier one.



travelling standby doesn’t necessarily give airside access but my friend asked her if she could issue me a BP to allow me to go through. “does he have a silver card then” was her question (i was too struck by all this to be doing much talking - left that all to my friend). “oh, he’s actually a GGL with CCR” and at their request, I showed them my cards as neither had seen a CCR card before. She called a colleague and I was issued with a BP - interesting still displaying ‘world traveller’ (and my app BP for the return flight would say 64A, world traveller)




So i said my good-byes to my friend and went to the CCR boardroom to work for a few hours - periodically checking with the lounge angel who was very friendly and helpful. he was pretty hopeful / confident that i would make the flight though I was feeling nervous given even 70 mins before departure, i was still showing as waitlisted.

45 mins before departure though I had been given a seat and it turned out to be a very good seat: 20A on a new J high.



Boarding had already started at the B gates so it was actually time to head straight over there.