Home-based is not at all "code" for a paid commute. It is a paid commute, but it's a lot more. Home-basing means you're not guessing, bargaining, betting, hoping, gambling, or otherwise stressing out about how you go to work. Home basing regards rest rules. Regardless of your assignment, you live in your base, the golden shangrila of assignments. Carriers that do home-basing tend to commute far less. You may go to the airplane, then go to your house when the month's assignments are done. For those who hate commercial travel, that's a big plus.

Home basing is not like jumpseating to work. One must deal with the same delays or cancelations that apply to paying passengers, but one is not under any obligation to find a way to work; that's the company's responsibility. You don't need to show up with ten alternatives and plans to bounce from hub to hub. You don't need to solicit a ride and hope there's room, and you don't need to ride an uncomfortable jump seat. Your day begins at your home, drive to the airport, get on a paid flight, go to where ever you are sent, and you get paid from the time you start. That's not at all like jumpseating. You know you'll have a seat. You don't guess. You don't worry about plan B. If your flight is delayed, it's delayed, and it's not your problem. You don't need crashpads, and you don't pay for hotels.

Home-basing means you don't have to drive to a particular airport, fly the company airplane from there, go back to that airport in the company airplane and then return to your home....because otherwise, that particular airport would be your base. If that's where your home is, then it would be truly home basing...but if you don't life in TUL, in the context of your question, then the reality is that TUL would become your base. Home basing means you're based at home, or at the airport associated with your home, which means you can live nearly anywhere and still do the job. Home basing usually means you start at home, drive to your local airport and fly. out on a company-bought ticket to the location where the airplane is. If the airplane is in Los Angeles, then you go there and pick it up from the crew that's going off duty. If the airplane is at Teterboro, or Ft. Lauderdale, or Chicago, then you go there.

Home-basing is a big deal to those who have it. In fact, many might say it's a deal breaker. Take that away, and there's no reason to stay with that employer. It's not merely a paid commute.

Over the years I've done home basing in which I was flown commercially to the airplane, or lived in my "base" near the company offices and took a company airplane, or got flown to an international location in a first class seat and deposited for a period of time, or even assigned an airplane that for all intents and purposes was mine, to get to the airplane I'd fly in the field, then take the "commuter airplane" home, or to the next assignment. There are a lot of ways to do it, but I meet few who are home-based who would still do the job, if that were taken away. I've heard some say that home basing isn't a big deal; for many, it's everything. It's a very big deal.