There is no question in my mind that non-revs do not belong in any seat that any paying passenger is willing to pay for, either in cash or in miles, and I also take this personally. Yes, the non-revs have jobs that are not always easy and yes, they deserve some consideration, but is it a more difficult job to be involved with four flight legs in a day as an attendent than as a paying passenger who also needs to work a full day in between? Slogging around the northeast on business being consigned to those miserable JungleJets much of the time only has as its compensation the earning of enough miles to be truly comfortable on longer flights, and they are making it much more difficult for us than it needs to be.
If you read Vulcan's posts, you will see how many of us are now treating the HoKeY and 72 hour CO rules for upgrading, even to Europe (while Ed only travels to Asia), and that is to use NW or KL (or AA) any time CO that will not immediately confirm an upgraded seat in the front of the plane. Our rule is never to play HoKeY, because if we were to end up in the back watching non-revs and/or empty seats up front, there would be a lot of steam coming out of our ears.
We understand that the dollars that we spend on NW's B fares are not the dollars that CO would like to get for its BF seats, but you can be sure that that amount (plus the miles used) is a heck of a lot more than any subtle benefits it might get from giving it away free to a non-rev or leaving it empty (or, as posited by Weatherboy "to preserve the value of the seat."). The value of the seat is zero once the plane takes off without somebody having paid something to put his butt in it, and the list price J fare is slowly becoming an obsolete fiction in today's economic and informational environments (witness all of the Z specials for the last six weeks of this year and be prepared to see a whole lot more of them as time goes by).


[This message has been edited by monitor (edited 10-26-2002).]