A Profitable Way to Volunteer

Seth: So we were supposed to leave San Francisco for Auckland via Sydney on October 10.

Unfortunately, we had triaged out lots of things on our to-do lists that we just didn’t manage to get done by the time we had to go to the airport. The preceding weeks had been exceedingly busy, with only a few off days between Burning Man, a two week bike trip from Seattle, WA to Eugene, OR and a wedding in Wisconsin. We both had battled that nagging feeling in the pits of our stomachs that we had forgotten something important or neglected something huge.

Luckily, we arrived at the airport and were told that the flight was overbooked. I’ve always been quick to volunteer for a bribe of airline vouchers and upgrades, and it didn’t take Erin much convincing when they offered us $400 each in travel vouchers and an upgrade to business class the following night. Apparently it was the end of spring break in Australia, so everyone was trying to get home. So we giddily went back to my Aunt Randy’s house, knocked out a whole bunch of our chores the next day, and went back to the airport.

The flight was overbooked again, and we were offered $200 more in vouchers each, and business class the next night. So we caught a cab back, did more errands the next day, hit some of our favorite spots, and went back to the airport.

Ditto. This time, they offered us another $400 in vouchers each, and an upgrade to first class. Randy had left town, and Erin thought it was nigh time to start accepting their offer of hotel vouchers. So off to the Doubletree (thanks, United!) to bask in our profitable volunteerism.

By this time, Erin was sorta tiring of this game. We’d gotten first class seats, $1000 each in vouchers on United, a nice hotel room, and had completed our painfully large to-do lists. But I was enjoying the game, and as we only bought a one-way ticket to NZ, was relishing the fact that we could probably fly home for free at the end of our trip. Plus, I wanted to watch the Cowboys-Patriots game on Sunday (we lost, it sucked). So we agreed that our last night of volunteering, if it was still offered, would be Saturday, as long as they kept us in first class. How quickly we had become snobs.

So the next night we went to the airport, had dinner (thanks, United!) at our usual spots (the sushi people had taken a liking to me), and we’re pretty blase about the whole thing.

Side note: when my bag went through the X-ray machine for the third time in three nights, the TSA guy pulled out a pocket knife that I’d mistakenly tucked into my stove pouch on our last backpacking trip. Wonder why the knife wasn’t detected the first two nights I went through security…

Anyway, we thought we’d check out the first class lounge just to see what kind of ridiculousness we could find. But the host took our boarding passes, and said that first class was overbooked with paying passengers, so we had to go back down to business class. We were actually pissed off for a little bit, until we reminded ourselves that we were still going business class and had made $1000 each in United vouchers.

This night, people were really freaking out. One lady was sobbing because she wasn’t going to get on, another guy offered me $200 for my confirmed seat, and there were hordes of people claiming that they’d be hated/fired if they didn’t make this flight.

Up to this point, we’d been pretty confident that we were heartily screwing United. But we actually, and bear with me here, began to see ourselves as good samaritans. After all, two people made the flight that night because we volunteered to stay for a few hundred bucks, and United got to avoid having two people permanently hate them. But this time, when they were processing our vouchers (only $200 each), they didn’t even give us confirmed seats for the next night because they knew we’d keep taking vouchers and it was still overbooked. Unfortunately, by this point we were ready to go.

So the next day we went through the same drill. It had begun to feel like work. We caught the train. We made small talk with our friends (United ticket agents, Sushi purveyors, TSA agents, etc) hung around, read stuff, paid attention at the right times, filled out paperwork, got paid $200 each again) and took the train home.

By this point, Erin was past being ready to leave. So on 10/15, our sixth night at the lovely San Francisco International Airport, after getting bumped off five nights in a row and amassing $1400 each in United travel vouchers, three nights stay in expensive hotels (DoubleTree, some crappy airport hotel and the Westin) and hundreds of dollars in food vouchers, we actually boarded the flight. We relished our moist towels, warm nuts, free booze and bulging money belts.

It was the perfect start to a trip. Heaps of money, free stuff, helping people and amply flexibility. Let’s hope it keeps up like this…