When starting your career at an airline, you will probably soon hear one of these terms: non-rev, ID90, ZED, Interline travel, or staff travel. What is it, and what are the differences?

First of all: basically, they all mean the same: your staff travel benefit. Their origins and terms may differ a bit.

What is Staff Travel?

Airlines around the world participate in multilateral agreements. Airlines that are part of alliances like Star Alliance, SkyTeam, or OneWorld all have these agreements with each other. In the United States, this is often referred to as Interline travel. This is a voluntary agreement between airlines that enables their employees to travel on other airlines for discounted rates. Interline travel benefits are often available to employees, spouses, parents, dependent children, and retirees of the airlines. The catch is that you will only get a seat if there is one available on the plane. If the plane is fully booked, you’re out of luck, and you’ll have to catch another flight.

Depending on where you live, this benefit is often called non-rev, ID90, ZED, or staff travel.

USA

As you can read in our blog post about non-rev travelnon-rev stands for non-revenue. This terminology is mostly used in the United States and is often referred to as ID90. ID is short for Industry Discount; 90 refers to a 90% discount. You may also come across ID80, ID75, or ID50 tickets, which all have their specific terms. Read more about that here.

Europe

If you live in Europe, you might come across the term ZED or Zonal Employee Discount. This is a multilateral agreement created in 1994 by Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa, Malév Hungarian Airlines, and SAS. These days, over 170 airlines are participating in this agreement. Employees of these airlines can fly with the participating airlines for reduced rates. Compared to ID90, these rates are often higher. In The Netherlands, where StaffTraveler is based, we refer to this benefit as IPB. This abbreviation of ‘Indien Plaats Beschikbaar; translates to the best summary of what it is all about if a seat is available. As mentioned before, this is the downside of staff traveling. To make staff travel easier for everybody, we founded the StaffTraveler app. This app enables you to get the loads for the flights you wish to staff travel on so you can estimate your chances of getting on board.

StaffTraveler

StaffTraveler has quickly become the largest airline employee community in the world. Besides loads, you’ll find useful airline-specific information, insider city tips by other airline employees, and heavily discounted hotel rooms and rental cars around the world. Download the app for iOS or Android to make your next staff travel trip easy and stress-free, like it should be!

StaffTraveler for web

Read more about staff travel on our website. Happy staff travelling!