With Eva working at an airline for the last several months, we had a fantastic opportunity to experience “non rev” travel. Basically if there’s an empty seat on a flight, we could take it for very little cost.

A typical Friday night in the air

Knowing that we only had a limited time to enjoy this benefit (it was a temporary position to fill in for someone on mat-leave), we were quite aggressive about getting the most out of it! We did well:

• 4 months
• 4 Continents
• 8 Countries
• 142 Hours / 68,00 Miles in the air

It’s a great benefit, but can also be pretty stressful compared to travelling with a confirmed seat. Sitting at the gate, we’d always have the conversation about “What happens if there’s only one seat available to us?”. Do we split up? What alternative route will the person left behind try?, etc. (and it was typically going to be me left behind!).

It’s very exciting when your name does get called! It’s like you just won a prize and you’re being called up to the stage to receive your shiny new boarding pass with a seat assignment on it 🙂

On flights that were close to full, the boarding process would be mostly complete and we’d still be sitting at the gate just hoping for our names to be called. There was one particular flight where there were two missing passengers and we were hopeful we might get their seats. 10 minutes before departure the gate agent made the call to offload their bags. A minute later, the two passengers came running to the gate – and we were out of luck 😦

I heard lots of horror stories about people getting stuck places for days and not being able to get on a flight home. We didn’t have any experience close to that – and not once were we late getting back for work! For sure, that’s partly luck – but it’s also a result of lots of planning on our part. We never said, “Let’s go to X” and then just try to get there. We always looked at flight loads first – and then decided on where to go based on those. I also spent a LOT of time figuring out alternate routes and multiple back-up plans to get us home on-time.

SYD to YVR: drop us off here?

In the four months, we managed to squeeze in:

• A weekend in London
• Sunshine and great food in San Francisco
• Hello Japan!
• The Grand Canyon
• Rome before Christmas
• Summer in Sydney (in December)
• Weekend in the sun: Maui
• Rendezvous in Paris; Beer in Belgium

It’s going to be a bit weird spending all our weekends in Vancouver now!