Alaska Airlines invests in its people with $200 million in payouts and enhanced travel perks 

Alaska Airlines employees are wrapping up the week on a positive note, as our annual incentive payout brings the total payouts for Air Group Employees to $200 million for 2023.

Our company’s annual payout, called Performance Based Pay (PBP), is determined by our performance towards specific company-wide goals for safety, guest experience, sustainability and profit.  

Despite facing our share of headwinds last year, we once again delivered an excellent operation from start to finish. As a result, employees earned an above-target PBP payout for the third year in a row and 16th time in the 21-year history of PBP. This equates to more than 6 percent of most employees’ annual pay last year. 

Credit to our employees, who are the strength of our airline,” said CEO Ben Minicucci. “I am especially pleased that we exceeded our targets in both Safety and Guest Satisfaction, which directly reflect the care, attention to detail, and the quality of work that our people deliver every day.” 

The PBP payout is in addition to the approximately $30 million in 2023 operational bonuses that employees earned for achieving monthly on-time and customer satisfaction goals. The combined monthly and annual 2023 payouts paid to employees totals $200 million. 

As an added way of saying thank you, we also awarded four one-way confirmed travel passes for every eligible employee at the company. These passes can be used anywhere throughout our network—like these new & exciting leisure destinations below 👇🏼

Employees asked for better travel perks, and we listened.  

While most airline programs offer travel privileges to parents and dependent children, we realized we had an opportunity to improve our program to reflect our diverse workforce with a variety of family structures. We already extend travel privileges to one spouse or partner as well as all dependent children plus two parents for every employee, and now we’re expanding the definition of loved ones.  

We are one of the first airlines to allow greater flexibility in who can access our employee travel program. Beginning this month, employees are able to designate up to two people in lieu of parents to enjoy their travel privileges. This means that employees can now extend any unused parent travel benefits privileges to adult children, friends, siblings or anyone special to them. What’s so special about this change is that the idea came directly from our employees.  

For the inaugural year of this expanded program, 43% of our employees have taken advantage of the change and added new loved ones to their travel privileges. 

More ways to fly  

In addition to unlimited standby travel, we are always looking for more ways to encourage our employees to take to the skies. On average, every year—including 2024—we gift our employees two roundtrip tickets anywhere Alaska flies.  

They can use these tickets to book important or celebratory trips well in advance. If employees don’t want to use these confirmed tickets, they’re now able to trade them in before they expire for Mileage Plan miles that can be used on Alaska or any of our airline partners.   

Speaking of miles, in honor of our 90th anniversary, we gifted each employee 90,000 miles – that’s enough for a roundtrip ticket anywhere in the world.