Dawn: Stuck in Non-Rev Hell

I was woken at 5:30am today by a call from Dawn. She flew to Seattle last night to try and catch a redeye to Minneapolis on Northwest. It was not to be: NWA had substituted A320s for 757s throughout the day and had a huge backlog of stuck revenue pax, to say nothing of non-revs. Apparently the situation is the same throughout the western US: the best chance of getting to MSP is from Great Falls, MT, and only because it's booked solid rather than overbooked.

Okay, fine, there are other games in town than NWA. The best way is to go to Denver on Alaska or Frontier, and then to Minneapolis on NWA or Frontier. I checked Alaska's 7AM flight to DEN: 8 seats available, but 50 - count 'em, fifty, non-revs listed. No-go! Desperate, I started checking Alaska flights to the southwest and the east coast. Boston, Washington DC, Newark, Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas: everything is overbooked. I checked Frontier to Denver: oversold all day and all week. I checked United. Oversold. I checked America West to Phoenix. Oversold.

I decided it's just not a good day to non-rev out of Seattle, and listed Dawn on a Horizon flight back down to Portland. The good news is that here, there is a 1PM flight to Denver that's wide open. From there, she'll non-rev on a Skywest flight to Fargo (her ultimate destination anyways) that is looking wide open. Just gotta get creative sometimes.

She'll get there at 10PM, nearly 24 hours after she began. She didn't sleep all night. I'm going to keep her company at PDX now, until I leave on my overnight trip at 11.