If they were either, they would stop showing up.
Which is what happened, at one airline. Which is why the pay went up.
It's a little bit ridiculous to complain about low wages for a job in a thread about an employer tripling wages to ensure that the job in question is staffed.
It's a little bit ridiculous that their pay is so low that increasing it enough to keep it staffed means triple.
If your employer started getting desperate could they offer 3x your salary? Would they need to come anywhere close?
(It's also double pay; the headline has been corrected.)
Like health insurance that doesn't get used is valued well above $0, but it's providing risk mitigation. A travel perk isn't risk mitigation.
A few years ago it was $10,000 a year to get added as pilot's family member for that travel perk. I don't know how that may have changed over the past couple years.
I did not understand why the carriers allowed that.
You could make an argument that COVID has made it difficult/impossible to use that perk so perhaps that perk really is worth ~2x the salary.
You're conflating common usage of "value".