Flying on ExpressJet Branded- long winded review

[Eastbayk]

We non-reved on the ExpressJet branded side this weekend and other than a few minor irritations, we had a great time. CAL employees can also non-rev on XJ and I've *heard* (rumor alert- this in unconfirmed) that since XJ is doing the Delta flying in CA that they are trying to work out a non-rev agreement with Delta as well. In the interest of learning from others' mistakes, here's what was good and not so good.

We figured out how to list pre-flight via the internet, but it only allows you to list as point to point (IE JAX to NOA not JAX-NOA-AUS). We were doing two legs and thus had to reserve it as two seperate round trips to get it into the system. Don't do this- more on why later. Call the travel office and have them make the reservation for you. Aaron had booked Max and I this way but had had the travel office book him and they had no problem listing him as one trip with multiple legs. Also on the computer system, you can't see what the forcasted loads are, you can only see how the planes went out. So you have to do some guesstimation about how full the flight might be. Now is a great time to be flying b/c the loads are not high. On 50 seat planes, we had between 9 and 30 people onboard. Hopefully loads will increase as the airline gets more popular and becomes wildly sucessful and the pilots overpaid and underworked... Back to reality

Check in- they have the standard check in machines with 1-2 staff to check bags. The staff seem to be cross-trained as rampers/gate agents/duties as assigned for the most part and can handle basic stuff at all positions but not really advanced stuff like listing you for flights. Of course our experience was limited to only 3 airports, so I can't speak for everywhere. We arrived at the airport to check in to find that 1)they wouldn't check my and Max's bags all the way though to our final destination b/c we had 2 seperate reservations instead of it being listed as one round trip. We would have had to go pick up our baggage and recheck it during our layover. They had no problems checking Aaron's all the way through though. They were unable to relist us properly at the desk and we ended up standing there and calling the XJ travel office to get it fixed. They were able to fix it immedietly and we were only delayed for about 15 minutes getting it all straightened out. I'm not sure why they were unable to list non-rev's at the check in desk, but it seems like that should be something they can do. 2) The machine to print out the luggage tags wasn't working and they had to hand write all of the luggage tags. My thought was perhaps if they were dedicated to that position and had more training they might have been able to fix that kind of problem with the system, or at least identify it, but again, that's just me.

We took a two leg trip and they only gave us 1 boarding pass that listed the flight number and seat assignement for the first leg, but had our final destination (not the destination of the flight we were on) listed. We saw that we had seat assignments for the second leg, but didn't get a boarding pass for it. We made our way down to the gate and the flight went smoothly. We had a great crew and a great flight.

When we got to our layover city we had to talk to the gate agent to get boarding passes for the second flight. She was unable to print them at the gate (not sure if it was computer problems or not) and had to go back out to the bag check area to print them for us. Seems like that might become an issue if they have people who are taking more than one leg, rev or non-rev, but for now it was not a big issue. Also, she said she could see she had 3 non-rev people but couldn't see their names. For the second leg we had the same great crew and another great flight. We talked with them about 5 minutes after the flight about how non-reving was going and they said they had heard some horror stories, but we said it was going well. We must have been about the only people to check bags b/c they were waiting for us by the time we got to the baggage claim area.

On the trip back we again had trouble checking in. We had to check each of us in individually on the machines (on the way out, b/c of the listing issues the ticketing agent did it). Aaron was able to swipe his card and check in on the computers, but it gave me an error message and I had to have the ticketing agent do it. She was able to do it with no problems but again had trouble printing. It took her 3 tries to get our boarding passes to print and she couldn't get our luggage tags to print at all. She told us to go ahead to the gate and they would bring us our luggage claim tags when she got them taken care of. We hung out for a bit and then checked in at the gate where our tags were indeed waiting. The first leg went well. Our crew was more perfunctory than the other, but again it was a good flight.

Back in our transfer city we again had to ask for new boarding passes. We talked to the gate agent about how they had worked it previously and he said he'd get them to us. Eventually he ended up hand-writing us boarding passes (seriously!) and just told us to take any empty seats on the plane. The crew on this flight was new to the branded flying- said Continental Express instead of XJ a few times, didn't turn on the XM radio until the flight was underway (takes about 20 minutes to initialize) but we couldn't listen to it b/c the flight attendant never passed out the headphones (even though I asked her if she had any so we could listen to the radio). The FA was obviously new, reading the announcements out of a book and rushing to get the drink and snack service done in time, but she did a good job and even handed out mints as we were leaving the flight. Again our baggage was waiting for us when we got to the claim area.

So overall, it was a pretty smooth trip. A few snags that I think XJ needs to work out and I heard a few grumbly comments from some of the other passengers, but for the most part problem free. We're looking forward to non-reving on them again.

Kim