Jen is a junior flight attendant at LAX. She flies reserve and has little say over her schedule, awaiting a phone call on duty days to find out where she is flying. But when she noticed her colleague Mona was offering up her Los Angeles – Sydney – Los Angeles trip in a password-protected crew chat forum, she jumped at the opportunity and DMed her.
The post said, “3-day SYD trip available from LAX, departing Friday. I love cookies. DM me if interested.” Mona wrote back saying that she would gladly transfer the trip to Jen, but Jen would need to Zelle her $200. Jen was thrilled to fly to Sydney and bank so many flight hours and Mona was happy to stay home and watch her granddaughter.
United Airlines is firing senior flight attendants accused of turning desirable international trips into a private side hustle. The union is fighting back, but if employees knowingly sold trips in violation of company policy, termination should hardly come as a surprise…and arguably should be applauded.
United Airlines Fires Senior Flight Attendants Accused Of Selling Coveted Trips
United Airlines has reportedly terminated a growing number of senior flight attendants accused of bidding for desirable trips they never intended to work, then selling those assignments to more junior colleagues.
The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents United cabin crews, says it has seen a “significant increase” in members being fired over alleged trip-trading violations during the last several months.
As first flagged by Paddle Your Own Kanoo, the alleged scheme involves senior flight attendants using their bidding priority to secure coveted international routes or desirable days off, then transferring those trips to junior flight attendants in exchange for money or other compensation.
This practice is often called “trip parking.”
How Selling Flight Attendant Trips Works
Flight attendant schedules at United are heavily governed by seniority. Employees submit their preferences each month, and those with the most seniority generally have first access to the most desirable schedules.
For many flight attendants, that means longhaul trips to cities like Paris, Rome, Tokyo, or Sydney rather than a string of short domestic segments (some love domestic same-day turns as well, like going from Los Angeles to Chicago and back).
Longhaul flying can also be more efficient. A flight attendant trying to accumulate a certain number of monthly hours may prefer a handful of lengthy international trips over many shorter flights with repeated boarding, deplaning, and airport sits.
United allows flight attendants to trade trips after schedules are awarded. That flexibility is valuable and necessary in a workforce of about 30,000 members. People have appointments, family obligations, and emergencies that can arise unexpectedly.
The problem arises when a senior employee bids for a desirable trip without intending to work it, then demands payment from a junior colleague who could never have obtained that assignment through the regular seniority-based bidding system.
Advertisements for such arrangements may use euphemisms like “cookies,” “hugs,” or “kisses” to indicate that compensation is expected. The junior flight attendant gets a desirable trip and potentially a large block of flight hours. The senior flight attendant gets paid to stay home.
On one level, both participants may consider that a win. But it plainly undermines the seniority system. A trip awarded based on decades of service becomes a private asset that can be resold to the highest bidder, hurting those lower on the scale who are trying to play by the rules.
United Is Firing Flight Attendants, Union Pushes Back
United prohibits selling trips for money, as do American Airlines and Delta Air Lines. Other carriers, including Southwest Airlines, permit the practice or do not expressly prohibit it.
The AFA says it will challenge the recent terminations and seek reinstatement when it believes United has failed to establish wrongdoing.
The union said in a memo:
“We demand a proper investigation, we demand a proper notice of this new reality, we demand a decision be made on fact and not suspicion, and we demand progressive discipline be adhered to when and ONLY IF wrongdoing is truly established.”
That is a reasonable demand as far as due process is concerned.
United should not fire a longtime employee simply because a computer detected that she repeatedly traded desirable trips shortly after receiving them. A suspicious pattern is not necessarily conclusive proof that money changed hands.
But if United has messages, payment records, admissions, or other credible evidence showing that an employee was intentionally acquiring trips to sell them, the union’s indignation is misplaced.
Employees know the rule…it’s part of the collective bargaining agreement, not a personal asset.
Should Selling A Trip Really Cost Someone A 30-Year Career?
I understand why some will view termination as excessive, particularly when the accused flight attendants may have decades of service. Progressive discipline generally makes sense. If someone makes an isolated mistake, a warning or suspension may be more appropriate than immediate dismissal.
But this does not sound like a case of accidentally violating an obscure scheduling rule.
If a flight attendant deliberately built a recurring side business around selling trips, that involves planning, concealment, and repeated violations of a clear policy. At that point, the problem is dishonesty…can this employee be trusted with anything?
United has also dealt with this issue before. In 2019, the airline reportedly developed software to detect suspicious trip-trading patterns, and in 2020 it terminated 28 veteran flight attendants accused of trip parking. One of those employees later sued United, alleging age discrimination.
That history makes it difficult for anyone to claim the prohibition came as a surprise.
Still, United must prove each case individually. The fact that an employee is senior, expensive, and frequently trades away good trips cannot itself establish misconduct. Otherwise, this crackdown risks appearing like a convenient method of removing highly paid employees. There should be proof of money exchanging hands.
Unions defend seniority systems because they provide objective rules and protect employees from favoritism. You cannot insist that the best trips be awarded based on seniority, then quietly allow senior employees to monetize that privilege by selling those trips to junior colleagues.
CONCLUSION
United Airlines is reportedly firing an increasing number of senior flight attendants accused of selling desirable international trips to junior colleagues. The union is right to demand evidence, a proper investigation, and fair treatment. No flight attendant should lose a career based only on an algorithm or suspicion.
But if United can prove that employees intentionally bid for coveted trips and sold them for profit, I have little sympathy. Trading trips is a legitimate and important scheduling tool. Turning seniority into a private ticket brokerage is something else entirely. No one should knowingly violate a clear rule, conceal the transaction behind “cookies” and “kisses,” and then act shocked when the airline takes disciplinary action.
What do you think about this issue?
Sara Nelson (head of AFA) is a cancer on the industry. These FA’s should all be fired if it can be proven they traded trips for money. It’s a fireable offense. Some other airlines have different policies. Doesn’t matter. UA policy is clear. You broke it, repeatedly. GTFO
Assuming this is a different ‘Matthew’ (not the author). Clearly, you are no fan of unions generally, or Ms. Nelson specifically. Noted, and nothing new coming from some folks, such as yourself.
However, even if all unions were abolished tomorrow (unlikely and more harmful than helpful), it wouldn’t solve the specific problem here. As long as the scheduling software allows direct-to-employee-ID drops (union or not), the shadow market and its financial incentives stay intact. Without switching to blind clearing pools, you aren’t fixing the vulnerability.
(But, then again, I don’t think you even really care about the underlying issue; you just wanted to bash unions.)
KC, ‘anti-seniority’ is a pretty thin-veil for anti-union. You pretty much ‘took off the mask’ in the exchange above.
On bidding by “performance,” who evaluates if an FA was “nice” on ORD-NRT; is it the manager survey scores? That leads to favoritism, retaliatory scheduling, and at its worst crew afraid to enforce safety rules out of fear of a bad rating. Misconduct and ‘poor’ service are usually handled through discipline policies, not scheduling software.
If we stay focused on the actual problem here, these shadow trip-trading markets, then the answer is something along the lines of ‘blind pools,’ like I was suggesting before.
not at all. Unions helped bring us food safety, a 5 day workweek, workmen’s comp insurance, among other things. I am only against corrupt and arrogant unions like the one Sara leads. They are obtuse, have sold out their members and deserve a full recall. She has betrayed her union members
Fair enough. Fortunately, those members can and should vote, and run for leadership as well, especially if they want to see change, hold those in-power to account.
I do not know that United necessarily has a dog in this fight – the flights get covered.
This does however, accentuate the obscene advantages which come from seniority – its a union contract generated side hussle, and it is not necessarily illegal, but it is smarmy. The old hags who enjoy such benefits already get enough. I hope younger, less senior, members join up and stage a coup which allocates the pie more equitably..
I will add, UA perhaps should not care if such a third party trade occurs, but, ironically, the wages it ultimately pay when an old dragon FA wirt senirity foregoes a trip in favor of a less senior FA are actually lower.
Its a bit ironic.
I must add, what level of “proof” should be required here?
It is quite easy to suss out suspicious pattersn even without AI. When such a convincing pattern is substantially established, I would shift any burden of proof from UA to the FA to prove a lack of wrongdoing – placing UA in a position to ferret out private financial transactions without the benefit of discovery is so strict as to make enforcement impossible.
Nor am I so sympathetic to supposed “mistakes” a FA makes. They use coded communications to capitalize on seniority to extract money from their own colleagues. This is not a mistake – it is avarice.
Matt, good on you for letting PYOK, VFTW, and OMAAT run with this first. Quite a vivid opener… “I love cookies.” *facepalm* I agree that these shadow market aren’t victimless side hustles; it’s rent-seeking that mostly exploits junior crew. Of course, as long as this doesn’t lead to un-or-understaffed operations, it doesn’t directly harm the airline, but the corrosive nature of the schemes ultimately do, even if indirect.
That said, outright trading bans are too rigid and harm legitimate emergency flexibility. So, if an airline actually wants to eliminate the shadow market while staying within current CBAs and labor laws, the software just needs blind clearing pools. Like, disable direct-to-employee-ID drops unless it’s a verified, equal-value trip-for-trip swap. Then, unwanted single-sided drops must flow into a central pool awarded by transparent contractual criteria (seniority waves or a first-come queue). Finally, require drops to hit the pool at least 72 hours before check-in to stop last-minute “trip parking.”
No, it will never be ‘perfect,’ and there’ll inevitably be people looking for loopholes in any new system, too, but such improvements would shut down the shadow market without touching union seniority or taking away legitimate flexibility. If anyone has better ideas (no, attacking unions and FAs generally isn’t better), please do tell.
1990 I agree with a lot of the things you say and I know you are a big union proponent but you have to admit that knowing that you are pretty much untouchable since you are part of a union does not incentivize good behavior but quite the contrary.
KC, if you read what I wrote, I do not defend these shadow markets; instead, I offer a potential solution to eliminate them. Instead of focusing on the issue at-hand, you’re just attacking the general concept of organized labor.
Did you see the part where I wrote above: “(no, attacking unions and FAs generally isn’t better)” It’s as if you took the bait, and said, ‘Oh! Oh! I hate unions! Lemme say that!!’ *facepalm*
Also, Matt, I find it interesting how AFA is approaching this. Instead of pretending the behavior was somehow an exception to company policy, they’re sticking strictly to procedural fairness, which they’re required to do under the RLA. Of course, defending a member’s right to contractual due process isn’t the same as endorsing the shadow market. Since investigating private off-site Zelle financial transfers is an evidentiary nightmare for management, focusing on procedural standards is really the only viable legal path the union has, unless you see a better way.
@1900: “disable direct-to-employee-ID drops unless it’s a verified, equal-value trip-for-trip swap.”
Impossible. No two trips are ever “equal value” – LOTS of things come into play in the evaluation of a trip’s “value” over another. And it’s not just about the pay. And even if the pay IS the same there are lots of things that make one trip “better” than another:
– Show/release times (commutability – HUGE for flight attendants that don’t live in base)
– Different layover city or cities
– Length of layovers
– Equipment flown (ask a flight attendant if they prefer a 737 over an A321…)
– Number of flights worked per day or for the whole trip
– Change in long or short sit times between flights
– Airline’s hub city the trips route through (veteran crews know they’re more likely to see delays thru hub “xxx” than hub “yyy” in the summer, so they are more likely to get reassigned)
– Days off (Tues – Fri trip vs same trip, same pay, Thurs – Sun)
– Position worked (lead/purser vs main cabin)
– Crew working with (trading to fly with your friends)
Saying the trips must be of “equal value” is basically impossible. There NEVER is “equal value” between two trips. There are too many ways to “value” a trip that your idea is, unfortunately, impractical.
Hi Paul, you are right to extend this to pilots; it’s not just flight attendants; and technically it’s not just commercial aviation. Any industry with shift-bidding and peer-to-peer swapping can spawn a shadow market. That’s why I think it’s healthy to discuss ideas for how to improve this (even if it’s just a thought-exercise on a blog.)
However, I think you’re conflating personal preference with contractual credit value. “Equal value” in my idea doesn’t mean identical layovers or aircraft; it just means equivalent pay/credit hours (15 hours for 15 hours).
Differing personal values are why people trade in the first place. Pilot A wants the early show-time, Pilot B wants the weekend off. The software check ensures it’s a true two-way swap (Trip A for Trip B), stopping this single-sided ID drops meant to collect cash under the table.
You are not wrong by any means – what is often seen in the pilot ranks is when someone wants “out” of something on their schedule (awarded vacation, specific trip – things like that) they have to offer it in some way where it’s advertised to the general pilot group to maintain “fairness”. Base trades is a good example. To maintain my anonymity, here’s a fictitious example:
I’m based in Reno, Nevada. I want to transfer to our other pilot base in Springfield, Illinois. There’s a pilot in Springfield that wants to transfer to Reno. Same plane, same staffing – trade should be a no-brainer. However – what if there’s a pilot senior to me, in Reno, that ALSO wants to transfer to Springfield? It’s not fair – under the seniority system – that I’m going to undercut his opportunity to execute the trade. So – the process requires the trade request be published for a specific period (two weeks or something) so anyone has a chance to participate, and the most senior pilot(s) wanting to switch between those bases get the trade.
That’s fair. And the same can be done with vacation weeks, since more than one pilot can have the same exact week (so another, more senior pilot can say, “Hey! I want that trade!” and participate).
But it doesn’t quite work that well between trips. Your “rotation” or “pairing” is particularly unique, and while there may be plenty of people willing to trade INTO yours – you may only want one particular rotation in its place. I can say “mine’s available” if I trade out of it (triggering a seniority-based request to take it), but shouldn’t be forced into the most senior pilot’s trip as a result. I should have a say in what trip I take in it’s place. So a system has to essentially work only between crews (“I’ll take yours if you take mine”), which can lead to abuses – as seen.
But the reason I brought up “other ways to value trips” is that there are crew members at any airline who would pay or sell trips based on things like I mentioned (show times, specific layovers) even if the pay is the same. Layovers in Brazil during carnival, Germany during Octoberfest, or even just New Orleans during Mardi Gras can go way more senior than other times of the year – and some crews would be willing to throw in a little cash to encourage a trade into them, for obvious reasons.
I understand how the airlines might want to crack down on this – and how the crews have created an underground market for them. It’s the economy responding to market conditions. And I, too, enjoy sharing the ideas and perspective with you and others, even just in the comments of one blog, buried on the internet.
In an ideal world, flight attendants schedule should be based on merit and crew location. Work assignments to Montreal, Brussels and Paris should first go to flight attendants who speak French. Miami (AAL) or Houston (UAL) based flight attendants should have first chance on assignments to South America.
If airlines have evidence that their senior flight attendants selling their assignments for cash, I truly support the airlines to fire those flight attendants.
Even though you began to (on language), we’d need to further define ‘merit’ and ‘crew location,’ because without specific terms, those too will be malleable. Like, we talking ‘start date’ (merger dates); how about, within 200 miles, within 2-hours commute (vehicle, rail, air?) Number of flights served; or pure months/years, etc. It starts to get complicated fast, but software is pretty good at using whatever metrics/guidelines set. Think of how they decide who to complimentary upgrade on a flight.
“Merit” can be pretty broad in scope. I only mentioned language skill because it is easy to justify. I never work in an airlines thus I do not want to pretend I know all the requirements in crew scheduling. While seniority does have value, it should not the defining factor.
That’s fair. Scheduling can be an issue in many industries, not just commercial aviation. So, there are some lessons here that we could learn and implement elsewhere. Might be above our pay-grade, though. Eh.
Why don’t declined trips go back into the pool? I understand the schedule flexibility argument, but it sucks for the people in the middle.
While I do think unions have their place any system designed purely on seniority and not performance (witness all the young pleasant FAs in Polaris ord to Tokyo for example lol) where there is no motivation to be nice is a disservice to customers.
Have a union to protect the workers fine. But don’t base it on seniority. You misbehave you don’t pick trips first. It would provide job protection and also incentivize good behavior.
Not sure why my response ended up at the top, but, if you care, you can find it there.
Solution is:
1. FA’s get paid more with more seniority up to 3 years. After that, the pay is the same.
2. FA’s can switch trips. They are asked not to seek payment but it is not enforced. However, FA’s can only switch trips 10 times per year with exceptions made for hospitalizations, deaths, or proof of severe illness or severe illness of a dependent or elderly parents.
Somewhat like takeoff and landing slots, public assets, once awarded to incumbents, who then monetize and/or encumber and/or trade and/or sell them privately for profit.
Airline ethics, where are you?
It is worth reiterating that while UA fully permits staff to trade trips freely to maintain flexibility, its Inflight Policies and Procedures Manual strictly prohibits employees from monetizing or receiving compensation for those trades. The said crackdown follows a broader industry push to protect the integrity of seniority-based scheduling systems. Airlines like AA and DL maintain strict bans on cash-for-trip swaps, whereas carriers like WN, AS, and B6 do not explicitly forbid the practice.
I did this only once with United (paid someone) when I was in customer service. I desperately wanted a particular day off and could not find anyone willing or available to trade the usual way, on paper, because it was very short notice. Finally someone stepped up but was giving up the second of two days off (they had already given up the first of those two to someone else). We agreed, the trade was registered legally, and I just handed them $100 cash. There was no “secret code” involved; since it was prohibited even way back when, we just quietly did the transaction. Of course one does not go telling anyone or everyone about such a transaction but then again, we didn’t have cell phones or the current type of trade system that FA’s have these days nor was there any type of algorithms to detect this.
It does seem like age discrimination if they are only terminating the senior FAs. The junior FAs are also violating policy but they do not get fired? Seems unfair. I wonder if United is pressuring junior FAs to admit to violating policy with the promise of amnesty if they give a statement identifying senior crew they traded with, allowing United to fire the more expensive senior crew?
I do believe there should be a stepped enforcement policy. The first time should be a less severe penalty than firing.