This thread is dedicated to anyone who has ever thought that it would be neat to work for an airline and "fly all over the place for free."

We were both TWA employees. She was a stewardess (yes, the year was 1967) based in Newark and living in Manhattan, and I worked at the Kansas City datacenter.

Following a brief courtship conducted through a weekly 2,600 mile round-trip commute (that only succeeded about half the time) as well as overnight trysts wherever her schedule took her that I could reach, we decided to make it official. The only place we could both get to on the chosen Saturday was Baltimore (no blood test; no waiting), so the Lovely Lane Methodist Church (1774) it was.

She went back to Newark to take out a flight that evening, but there was no non-rev space for me. So we began our wedded bliss in Dayton and St. Louis.

It didn't get much better. For our first vacation together, we started for the Bahamas on a Friday afternoon, spent Saturday and Sunday in St. Louis trying to get a flight to Miami, got there too late to get a room, and finally arrived at Andros Town on Monday morning.

Then there's the time I got bumped by a mail sack...

Too funny. Personal experience?

Well, at least you didn't ask them for an upgrade because you were on your honeymoon!

Bumped by a mail sack? Golly…….

I don’t feel too sorry for you though. It seems you have been traveling a lot anyway.

DH works for Delta & we've been pretty lucky Made is to AMS last summer, though we were sweating it until we had the tickets in hand. Coming back we made it easily from Munich- 1st class no less!
Going to Costa Rica over the holidays was a bit more scary. I got the LAST seat out from ATL to SJO, had to leave DH behind. Luckily, he caught the next flight. I was in tears until I saw he had a confirmed seat on an oversold flight. I didn't know what I was going to do if he didn't make it. Non-reving is scary, but oh so worth it when it works out!
Unfortunately, my husband flys for a living, and doesn't want to travel on his days off. Boooo!

Robespierre, how did she make out when American bought them?

She's been a Professor of History at Kansas University since 1974. I haven't seen her since our divorce in 1971.

Reading the almost year-old post, I was hoping to see a happy ending. Then again, maybe it was happy!

LOL....oooh

I worked for Pan Am in the 80's. I had taken quite a few non rev trips to Europe by shuttling from Washington up to New York and catching flights out of Kennedy.

Mr Big Shot convinced a childhood buddy who had never been to Europe that we should go over and carouse for a week. I told him not to worry. I would book his flights then take care of all our hotels using my 50% employee discount. I got a super rate on an Avis car rental in Frankfurt. I had a whole itinerary laid out for us including some hotspots for meeting chicks. All he had to do, I told him, was meet me at JFK on Friday. I would be the tour guide.

I got from Washington National to Newark no problem on the Eastern shuttle. Then took a taxi over to JFK. I met my friend at the appropriate gate for Pan Am flight to Frankfurt (either flight 66 or 72). He had an assigned seat but I had to wait around as a standby. They called his row and he got on. I told him I'd be on shortly. The gate agents just had to get everyone else on firts but we non-revs would get on last. I felt very confident because the flight was supposedly "wide-open" and besides, I had an MCO (miscellaneous charge order) which would bump me to first or Clipper class if the flight was full. I paid an extra $35 for it!

You guessed it. I never got on. That plane and the flight two hours later were totally full. I even tried TWA through Paris. They were full. I got a hotel room at the airport and spent the next three days trying to get out. I never mad it. My poor buddy who knew nothing about Germany was stuck over there by himself.

When he came back from the trip he told me he spent the whole trip in the hotel at Frankfurt airport. He did a lot of indoor swimming and drinking in the hotel bar.

That was the last time I spoke to him.

Those are horror stories? Clearly you have never been in Bombay transit hell for 48 hours (just one quote from my female travelling companion: "I am never going to the toilet again. I think they must have been playing basketball with used sanitary napkins in there!&quot. Then there was being left on a bench on the tarmac of Aden airport and taken to the plane in a luggage cart, trying to fly out of Manila non-rev during a coup d'état, flying out of Johannesburg without ticket or passport after a butcher knife mugging, not to mention the "special seat" that I got on a Paris-New York flight: "The passenger next to you with a blanket over him is dead, but we don't want the revenue passengers to know."

Kerouac- please tell me you are kidding!! OMG

It is all 100% true.

Andy NO ONE was asking questions about the passenger with a blanket over him the entire flight???

Hey, on a 747 (this was before the 777), there are plenty of other things to look at on a nearly full flight. Dead guy was in the center of a 3-5-3 configuration, and most of the people who get stuck in that center seat look dead anyway. The other victim bordering the cadaver was also an airline employee. We preferred not to acknowledge each other's existence.

Hi
After reading Kerouacs story of the center seat cadaver, it makes anything I have to say sound trite and trivial.Was he served a meal? I thought being treated like cattle at CDG and having to get a $400 hotel room so we could be back at the cattle call the next day was bad. I guess I won't complain again.

I sat next to a body in a bag across the Pacific once, but it was in the courier seat of a Flying Tigers DC8-63F, and I was the only passenger. He was freight.

I'm afraid kerouac gets the Most Horrific award in this category.
At least dead men tell no (boring) tales.

Geeze, I thought working in hotels for 13 years was bad! What a thread this is. How did they get the dead guy on the plane unnoticed or was he a stand-by from a previous flight?

Just tihnking about the health issues here, hmmmm.