Anyone else catch this? Is this allowed under our CBA? I'm surprised we haven't hesrd anything from ALPA about this. No Hawaii or Intl without accompanying employee?






Dear employees,

The unique privilege of pass travel is part of what makes working for an airline so special and it’s important to all of us. These privileges allow us to see the world with our families and close friends. We all share the responsibility to comply with the terms of United's pass travel policy; however, we’ve found an increasing number of instances where employees are abusing these privileges.

In violation of our policy, enrolled friend status and buddy passes can be purchased online every day, and “pass travel brokers” run underground businesses illegally selling buddy passes. We have discovered employees who have sold enrolled friend status or even fraudulently designated individuals as eligible family members. Some employees have used their privileges for themselves or family members to travel for other jobs or side businesses. Based upon conversations with my peers at the other major airlines, this situation isn’t unique to United.

These clear violations of our pass travel policy and our code of ethics are damaging to our company and we cannot allow them to continue. I’m sorry to say that within the past year, we have terminated more than 100 employees due to fraudulent activity related to buddy passes, with a disproportionate share relating to international travel.

To preserve the continued viability of our pass travel program, we are making two changes:

1) Beginning Jan. 5, 2015, all regular buddy pass riders traveling outside of the 48 contiguous United States must be accompanied by an employee or an employee’s eligible pass rider. Eligible pass riders are the employee’s spouse or domestic partner, enrolled friend, age-eligible children, parents and extended family buddy pass riders who are validly listed on the employee’s profile.

2) Beginning mid-February 2015, all regular buddies will need to be registered and certified a minimum of 48-72 hours before travel. Employees may designate a maximum of 12 people (in addition to extended family buddies) who may use buddy passes. Like eligible pass riders today, you will register your regular buddies on your travel profile (Employee Services > My Info) by answering a set of questions and certifying the responses to be true and correct. This process will help substantiate in advance that you have a relationship with those who use your buddy passes. Under the revised program, employees will still receive 24 buddy pass segments for these 12 designated buddy pass riders and extended family buddy pass riders to use.

I know these changes may inconvenience you, but we’re taking these steps with the goal of ending widespread misuse and fraudulent activity related to buddy pass travel. Our only alternative is to terminate the buddy pass program, which we are trying to avoid by implementing these changes. Although I am optimistic these changes will be successful in curtailing violations, if further violations occur we may be forced to further restrict the program, or even terminate the buddy pass program in its entirety.

We regret that we need to take this action, but if we allow fraud to continue we are turning a blind eye to those who are damaging our own company.. Our Corporate Security team will continue to monitor pass travel usage to ensure pass travel adheres to our policies and procedures.

For more details about these changes, please see the Questions & Answers on the Travel tab. You may also read the details about our Pass Travel Guidelines on the Travel tab. If you have additional questions or concerns, please contact the Employee Travel Center at [email protected].


Sincerely,

Donna Towle
Vice President, Employee Relations

Not allowed. But that's never stopped them before.

21-E-1 Company personal pass travel policies shall apply to pilots and shall not be changed or discontinued during the term of this Agreement without first advising the Association the reason therefore and affording the Association an opportunity to confer with the Company.

NWA had about the same language in our CBA when the company changed the buddy pass policy to require the employee to travel with the buddy. We had F/A's selling buddy passes on EBAY. The company argued that they were not changing the employees policy but that of the buddy pass riders.

Its an employee benefit to have buddy travel. It would be like saying your spouse can't travel and they can do it arbitrarily because the spouse isn't an employee.

The company is in violation of the CBA.

PERIOD.

I'll send the letter in to ALPA and let them decide the course of action.

While I agree that people that violate the policy need to be stopped BEFORE the deed is done, we need to do it in accordance with the CBA or a side-letter.

The company sees loopholes everywhere and even when they don't they just pretend there are and then rope-a-dope ALPA through the arcane legal process.

"21-E-1 Company personal pass travel policies shall apply to pilots and shall not be changed..."

"Policies" is a pretty broad word and one would think it pretty much covers all travel and pass issues. "Shall" is one of those no-nonsense words that leaves no interpretive room. And yet here we are with a change by fiat to a legally negotiated contract item. Some things never change.

APC,

..."without first advising"..."affording...an opportunity to confer"... produces such a contractual hole that you could fly an A380 through.

21-E-1 is wasted ink and would be better spent nailing down "purity of essence."

Where they'll argue is in the word "personal." A buddy pass is not "personal".

POE is easy to nail down...drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol. And, of course, deny women your essence.

Funny that we don't even have the A350 but they made sure there were loopholes in the contract big enough for it to fly through.

Personal means "of being or relating to a person". So personal passes means passes that persons use.

A buddy is certainly a person, and they certainly fall under the pass travel program.

So you meet a girl and decide to take her to Hawaii. But you CAN'T now because you didn't pre-designate her at the beginning of the year as one of your 12 people (because you didn't know about her yet).

Even if you did, no spur of the moment trips can be planned because you have to wait 72 hours.

Or that friend calls and says "Hey I'm off for a few days, lets hang out" and you say "Sure, just have to wait 72 hours because I can get you on a flight before that" but then they have to go back to work, so too bad for you.

Total BS. The company is going to lose this. Period.