
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.”
Quick math:
- Our plan is generous and consistent, averaging 7.73% of annual pay over the past 10 years. If you make $50,000/year – that adds up to nearly an additional $39,000 total in 10 years.
- If you look at the last 15 years, those numbers are even more impressive, averaging 7.96% of annual pay, which is nearly an additional $60,000 total in 15 years for someone making $50,000/year.
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.


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.A valuable part of our total rewards
We love how much our employees love to travel and 2023 was a year for the record books. Here are some of the highlights:- In 2023, 80% employees used their travel privileges to fly at least once. 53% of their spouses or domestic partners, 61% of their children and 37% of their parents also hitched a ride.
- On average, our employees are able to find a standby seat 75% of the time!
- The most popular employee destination outside of our hub cities were Spokane, WA, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
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