Originally Posted by
Elevation
I fly at Atlas which has a gateway program similar to but not entirely equal to home-basing. The value of home-basing depends on your minimum standard of living.
If you are comfortable in a crappy crash-pad at $150/month, the value of home basing is $1800/year. If you’d be getting yourself a $100/night hotel prior to a trip, the value would be roughly $6000/year. Same math applies with your stadnards regarding jump-seating to work v. positive space travel.
Me, I am used to living pretty poorly. I’d rather have the higher pay rate and retirement offered elsewhere.
Your monetary calculations are off. You are only talking about the cost of a crashpad for a month. You are not including the costs of anything else, for example: The costs when you may have to buy a ticket, the costs when you may have to book a hotel somewhere you get stuck, the costs of waiting to see if you can get on a plane, or if you may miss making your trip, the costs of having to coordinate your own travel, the costs of having to figure out what to do when your travel falls through, etc., etc.
Also, it is one thing to be jumpseating from ORD to ATL. It is whole different animal when you live somewhere that doesn't have thousands of flights a day out of your home airport.