I'm not sure how the concept would work at a passenger airline? Why wouldn't your airline just book you seats on YOUR airline?

Our contract says they can't schedule us on company jumpseats for trips that don't start or end at your base. So ... they have to buy us tickets on the pax carriers (our old contract also said that over 5 hours would be booked in FIRST CLASS, we have many International deadheads over 5 hours). FIRST CLASS tickets sometimes cost as much as $10,000 one way. I've never had the company question ticket prices as long as you stayed within your deviation bank (one of our few restrictions was we couldn't take the Concorde).

Because the company buys so many commercial tickets they negotiate corporate discounts with many of the airlines. At the end of the month they add up what they would have paid for your (discounted) tickets. You can spend that money to travel from your home to the deadhead city, or your home to your base.

The paperwork is a bit of a MAJOR hassle but if you don't live in domicile it can be a good deal. Some senior pilots bid all deadhead trips and only go to MEM for recurrent training (you can jumpseat or use your deviation bank for that).

Some airlines let us accumulate frequent flyer miles. For several years as a senior international f/o I was earning 250,000 ff miles/yr.

It's generally viewed as a good deal. One of the few problems in recent years is that the company has been "exaggerating" (pants on fire?) how cheap they could buy commercial tickets. Hopefully they fixed that in our latest TA?