Unlike many of my fellow Elite peers, I have to side with the employees and say that their non-rev policy is fair.

Having non-rev'd myself numerous times, especially on trans-oceanic segments on other airlines, I appreciate the 72-hour rule and other rules like it: you would too if you're standing-by in a foreign location anxious to get home. It's a privledge earned by the employees ...and even as a CO Platinum Elite, I have no problems freeing up F/J seats --even ahead of mine-- for the sake of the employees. In the scheme of things, there are so few non-revs in proportion to the rev passengers on-board, that their appearance hardly impacts all flights at all times. (And as someone with decent non-rev perks including good seniority status, I must say I've seen coach seats more often than first class ones compared to my luck with Elite upgrades...if I'm even able to get on-board a flight as a non-rev.)

However, I do have a gripe with this situation --and it's not with the non-revs, but with the revenue control freaks within the airlines, CO included. HoKeY, 72 hours, misc. silly rules aside, I think it's outrageous that more seats aren't elgible for award redemption, whether it be for upgrades or tickets. If a seat is available for sale, it should be available to anyone that wants it regardless of how they plan to pay for it. If the airlines want to limit their liability by limiting the number of reward seats, they should have thought about that before they gave away free miles, status upgrades, etc. and not at the time they release seats for award use. Or they should just up the mileage requirement for award travel.

What they shouldn't do is what Continental appears to have done: up it "artificially" by forcing their travelers to redeem exhorbitantly high "EasyPass" awards and not make Standard awards available. What they should do is eliminate the two award types and increase redemption requirements by 30% and make every seat available for sale available for redemption -or- let Elites use Standard awards for all seats available while non-elites would need to redeem at the "easypass" level for the same seat. At least this would skew the program to the elites ...while encouraging non-elites to gain/retain elite status to make use of their miles. (After all, isn't the purpose of a FF program to keep flyers loyal ...and not to piss-off the most frequent, most valuable traveler?)