This was disseminated to my "United Express" airline today. Does this mean UAX is charging all regional employees $20 each segment to non-rev? This should make my commute fun. :-/

Dear Regional Travel Partners,

We sincerely thank all of you for your patience as we transition through the ups
and downs of our new processes and systems.

We appreciate that each of you took the time to speak to us last Friday. We are
very happy to announce that the pass travel policies, including eligible pass
riders, boarding priorities and network availability is not changing for your
co-workers or retirees. As we explained during the call, an analysis was done
and we have a (dollars)7M gap per year to break-even with regional employee
travel. We reviewed various membership opt-in fee models, but were not able
to come up with a reasonable model to cover a (dollars)7M recapture. As a
result, we will move to an all segment fee program and will be discontinuing the
Annual Membership fee program effective May 1.

Those currently on the segment fee program will have no changes, except you will
no longer have to opt in and out each year. Here is a recap for those of you
that are currently on the Annual Membership program.

%95 Employees will no longer need to opt-in or opt-out for the travel program each year
%95 All employees are considered opted-in and will only pay as they go, either pre-paid or payroll deduct, as applicable
%95 Employees will pay the same fees as a UA employee, plus the following service charges.
%95 Initially all base segment fees will be collected via payroll
deduct. We are working on the technology to pre-pay this fee upfront with the other fees. We will have an ETA on this in the 4Q13.

The new base segment fees to be in effect as of May 1:

Base Segment Charges:
Home Airline: (dollars) 0
Other UAX, United Mainline- Domestic1: (dollars) 20
United Mainline - Other International2: (dollars) 50

Service Charges are subject to change. Please refer to United's Flying
Together-Travel intranet information for details on the UA employee fees**.
1 Domestic travel: within the 48 contiguous United States, as well as Alaska
and Hawaii. Domestic travel will also include travel within the Micronesia
Islands and from Guam and/or Saipan to the Micronesia Islands.
2 International travel: will be consider all other travel, including travel
to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa,
Asia, Guam, Micronesia and the South Pacific, to be international travel.
** Service Charges vary by distance and class of service used and are in
addition to the Base Segment Charge.

Welcome to the suck, where the happiness & productivity of UAX's vast pool of subcontracted employees isn't worth a measly $7 million to them (and I find that number very suspect. How exactly are UAX nonrevs costing them $7m? Increased fuel burn? Cans of coke?). If this works I wouldn't be surprised to see DL follow suit, they've already slashed DCI nonrev bennies a few times with virtually no pushback except by SkyWest (who was smart enough to put it in their contract).

AMR makes employees pay for non-rev too. It's absolutely disgusting. I don't mind as much to pay a little something if I'm going on vacation, but I find it sickening that I have to pay to commute to and from work.

Do they charge to jumpseat or only to non-rev?

Not that I don't agree with you all, but you wouldn't imagine the costs involved with "non-reving" at overseas carriers. Not only do we pay for jump seats but we pay a lot. Makes 20/leg look like peanuts.

Many UAX employees already pay per segment.

Jumpseating is free. That's the way around this for pilots but of course that puts you at the lowest boarding priority for the cabin behind everyone else.

United has been charging to non rev in some way, shape and form ever since the 2002 bankruptcy.

I'm sure I'll get jumped on for saying this but, the uax, dci, soon to be eagle are not employees of the airline they serve. Do the fuelers, groomers, catering or contract maintance employees get free travel? These all use to be jobs done in house. I would be very surprised if they get any travel benefits. What makes outsourced pilots, fas or for that matter any dci, uax etc employees any different? As far as skywest, I think they are being set up for a schooling by RA and the gang, soon to be followed by the boys at ual.

I could understand if they made the change for parents and a travel partner but the employee too?! I came from a DCI carrier and parents had to fly ZED "high" fares. Fine. Employees still flew for free. How are F/A's making $23/hour (and some F/O's for that matter) going to be able to afford to get to work? This is a terrible idea that some bean counter thought up that will end up costing more money in the long run due to late and cancelled flights b/c employees can't get where they need to, or simply don't care. These are YOUR customers United! Way to go!

For one the main difference between me (a pilot at express) and a fueler is that I provide the same service for the mainline employees.

Part of our compensation is non-revving. As regional employees, our monetary compensation quite frankly sucks, but it is supposedly made up slightly by our ability to non-rev on partner carriers. Taking away that benefit (or increasing the costs associated with it) effectively decreases our compensation. In other words, it is a paycut if this memo is true.

The partner carriers already get a screaming deal on the backs of poorly compensated regional airline employees. Now United want to essentially create a big paycut to all of us. As a pilot, it really doesn't affect me since I can jumpseat. But it will very negatively affect non-flight crew regional employees, which will of course make it even harder to draw competent talent to already struggling regional carriers.