For those of you not familiar with the term, Non-Rev stands for non revenue travelers…..namely airline employees. Namely……last to get on board!

I finished a three day trip today and my family picked me up at the airport, we drove home where I changed out my suitcase and packed one for Lucy. I decided we were going to try to surprise one of my very best friends for her 40th Birthday after all! I had originally decided it wasn’t even worth a try, the flights were listed oversold all day, but when I got home I took a peek and saw the 5:00pm to San Francisco was showing zero seats available. Yippie!! Zero seats was better than the negative five seats it was showing earlier! Even better……Lucy and I were at the top of the non-rev list…(this is the pass classification, according to seniority list.) If you don’t work for an airline, you might think I’m crazy to think I would get on a flight without seats available but airlines “oversell” flights according to the flights “no show” history. I really thought we had a chance, enough of a chance to schlep us and all of our stuff back to the airport and through security. As a non-rev on a full flight I couldn’t risk checking our stuff, otherwise it could and in this case would have ended up in SF without us.

We’re home and the celebration will happen without us, but my friend will know we tried! I took this photo of us and a video of our escapades to send to her for her birthday.This might sound funny but we had a great time, Lucy was really excited to go to the airport with mommy, she told anyone that would listen that we were going on an airplane….up in the sky! So, after a couple hours of hanging around the gate, and after the door closed and there was no chance we were going, I asked Lucy if she had fun at the airport? “Yes, we had fun at the airport!” When my husband picked us up she didn’t stop talking! She had an entire adventure to tell him about all the way home!