UA Employees fired for selling NRSA passes
 

USA TODAY -- United Airlines fires 35 employees for abusing, selling travel perks

Excerpt per FT rules

As they should be... such conduct its clearly prohibited and employees shouldn't be taken seriously if they plead ignorance of the policy.

Abuse of pass travel benefits has been around forever, but in this day and age, with greater restrictions on buddy passes and high load factors across the system, they are almost a useless perk, and have value for only the most flexible of travelers. On the other hand, higher-priority benefits (such as spouse/domestic partner designation), which come with virtually unrestricted, unaccompanied pass privileges, are much more valuable and the company needs to come down hard on this kind of fraud.

I wonder if United gets defrauded/cheated more by their own staff than their customers.

Like the card-only policy for paying for bags at checkin... it's not because of the customers.

My guess is that something such as this doesn't have to happen often for it to have a deterrent effect. You can bet that other UA (and other carriers as well) will all look at this and reassess their compliance with what is both clear and reasonable.

And rightly so!

Possibly! IDK if you've ever stared closely at the certificates agents hand out for hotels, taxi, etc. during an IRROP. If you look carefully enough you'll see a credit card number and other card details linked to the certificate. I'm guessing that's UA internal card to pay for these incidentals. Seems ripe for abuse by either party!

-James

And as such, that discussion of inventory management not releasing award / upgrade space has been moved to where it had been previously discussed in Value of 1K when GPUs don't clear despite 20+ open seats?

Let return to the topic of this thread

WineCountryUA
UA coModerator

I don't believe those are credit card numbers but gift card's which are pre-loaded with set amounts. Since they're processed through Visa or Mastercard, they look like debit card numbers.

Only skimmed through the article, but does anyone know how (and how much) the "three families, who were traveling internationally" paid for their tickets/NRSA passes?
"Put up for sale", does that mean eBay/Craigslist?

Would seem like a sure way to get caught...

What really confuses me about the story is that the 3 families traveling together said they had 'paid for first class tickets'. I thought NRSA tickets were all economy with chance of upgrade? How can an NRSA ticket be first class?

People are naive. Someone told them they had "first class tickets" when all they had was a pass which might get them into Y. But, what do they know? No different than the people who purchase from miles brokers believing that they've got the inside track on cheap tickets and then wonder why they get stuck half-way around the world when they get caught out.

Not sure if it's 'cheating' but I often see FAs giving premium class food and drinks to non-revs in Y or other goodies like amenity kits/blankets.

Perhaps UA is being too generous with their NSRA policy and should only extend the perk to immediate family members. While a bit rigid, I suspect it would make it a heck of a lot easier for UA to check against.

Also be curious to see how often sticky fingers happens between the GA and pax who are friends of the agent (i.e. non-elite pax bought revenue Y ticket and magically the computer says their CPU cleared!). That being said, I don't suspect these "upgrades" occur too frequently, especially given the high demand for upgrades (i.e. CPU lists which are multiple pages long). You know you are not getting that upgrade when a line forms for GS members!

-James

Not cheating, it's called not following officially stated policy. As someone who flies UA fairly often, that is one of the couple redeeming qualities of the airline: the ability for agents and crew to throw the book out the window to deal with the realities at hand be it IRROPs or serving a snack several hours earlier whilst seated in Y on one of those long haul TPAC segments.

Safe Travels,

James

NRSA can stand by for any cabin. If there is a co-pay, it's higher for premium cabins. If you list for a higher cabin you generally list for all lower cabins too (which is why you see them on the flight standby list as well as the F standby / upgrade list, same place as you see displaced F pax who are standing by for the flight).

There is actually minimal, if any fraud with this because of how it is setup. You get one person you can designate for these privileges; UA doesn't care the relationship. You can change it after I believe a year (maybe 3 months), but there is a not insignificant waiting period to change this designation. Anyone else needs to use one of your buddy passes.