Need to know about non-revving

[UPSwife]

Until today, I had thought UPS only had travel discounts with Southwest. I have since found out that there are more options for us to use to travel. However, I know nothing about the "non-rev" situation. I have seen people post about trips/non-rev and wanted to know:

1. Is there a way to check how many seats are available on a flight?
2. Are there better days/times to try to fly?
3. How often do you get stuck somewhere without a flight?
4. Any other advice you can give!

I am a teacher and can usually only fly during summer & holiday periods, and this summer my schedule is pretty tight as well. I was just curious if there are tricks to make this easier.

These are the airlines we have deals with:

• Southwest Airlines

• Delta Global Fare
• American Trans Air
• Scenic Airlines
• Cayman Airways
• Martinair Holland
• Korean Air
• South African Airways

I would appreciate any info you can share!

Felicia

[roz]

Basically the rule is that you need to go where no one else wants to go when no one wants to go there. With capacity reduced, flights to popular places are often full. If you must be there on a certain date and it's a popular destination, I would not chance it. That's why we used my AMEX points to buy tix on CAL to go to St. Maarten. So, steer clear of weekends.

[Chi829]

For DH and I, whenever we need to be somewhere, we tend to fly the first flight of the day, and try to avoid Fridays and Sundays. Those two days are thoe worst to non rev on. There is always a chance you will get stuck somewhere without a flight, but just call reservations,,,, (not during 7am-7pm) expalin to them that you are a non rev and that you would like to check the flight loads if they have the time. Always be extra couteous when calling reservations as an employee.

My experience has been, if you plan it right, and if you are pretty flexible, then things should be ok......

Good luck...

[rgphib]

When we want to go somewhere DH usually checks what the loads were for that same time the year before. We have been very lucky. We have been out to Hawaii 4 times (all times on the flights we wanted) but we also go when we know the loads are good...which happens to be my Feb. school vacation. Believe it or not, we haven't had any problems getting to Orlando. We even flew down for 3 days during New Years. We flew out of Orlando on New Years day on the last flight and then just spent the night in Cleveland and took the first flight to MHT.

My advice...be flexible. When we went to Florida for my April school vacation in order for me to stay until Sunday, DH drove me to West Palm Beach airport (2.5 hours away from where we were). It was worth it to not have to leave on Friday. He was staying for another week so he didn't care if he drove for a few hours that day.

Bring lots of books That same trip I was supposed to meet DH in CLE when he finished his trip and then we were going to fly to Orlando together. I ended up having to go to EWR and then got on the first Orlando flight (even though it was orginally oversold...you never know what is going to happen). So I got to Orlando at 11:30 and had to sit in the airport until 9pm! He of course had the condo keys and the rental car in his name. I didn't care though.....at least I got there.

We have been lucky to never get stuck (yet) but we tend to fly when there are a lot of open seats. Even then, I still get nervous

I am a teacher too, we are lucky in NH that we have vacation weeks different from MA so it makes it alot easier for us to get out of Manchester or Boston (and get back in). I would suggest to look at locations that are not popular during the time of the year you can travel (i.e. for us it was Hawaii in Feb). We haven't actually traveled at all during the summer. We have a summer house on a lake in central NH so we are there all summer.....this summer we would like to travel. We are anticipating alot of our travel benefits to change come next year so we want to use up his passes (Continental might change our priority and cancel Express's vacation passes).

Good Luck!

[UPSwife]

Thanks for the info. I am trying to plan a getaway for the week starting June 23. I have been looking at the round trip tickets on Southwest to get an idea of the "busiest" flights. It seems that there are seats available in all price ranges as long as we stay on the East coast. I think we may just pack our bags and head to the airport with 2-3 destinations in mind and see how it goes. This is my only time off for the summer since I am taking 3 classes. The good news is...I'll be finished with my master's in August. We are also planning to build a house on a nearby lake (we bought the land two years ago) and will be travelling less in future summers. I'll let you know where we end up going for vacation!