Originally Posted by
untied
I disagree.
Legacy UAL vacation was horrible. You had to bid for a number of days, but you had to put a bigger group of days in the request and ask for "early, middle, or late". Who knew why a request failed or how to avoid making your vacation request invalid??
This system is so easy and logical. You bid for the week you want off, and then put other dates around it as your 2nd, 3rd (etc) choice. That's your first bid group. Perfect!
Now you make bid group #2 and go for a different vacation.
You may go for a summer vacation on #1 and then try to get Christmas off on #2.
I don't know how it could be simpler.
If the dates don't work out perfectly, you can always bump your vacation up to 3 days. I've done this many times already and they always move the days (as long as they don't touch a holiday).
They need to fix the bugs (wrong number of days accrued, wrong fleet), but I really like the new system so far.
I found the instruction manual to be very useful and simple to follow too.
Don't get me wrong....I usually complain about EVERYTHING. This may be the only change that I've liked so far.
Which is a great system if you are junior. It used to be the senior pilots would grab a summer block and then Christmas.
This CAL way of bidding forces you to pick. You get to choose which one you want, because you can't have both. Chances are if you pick summer, then a bunch of other guys will pick Christmas so when you get around to bidding secondary, all those dates are already taken.
In the old UAL system you could have Christmas and summer vacations, but not anymore.
Its great if you are in the bottom half of your base, which is now why I'm starting to understand why the LUAL group tended to stay senior and not upgrade, and the LCAL group bid up right away.
Now that's going to even out since LUAL pilots aren't getting the advantage of being senior in a seat as much, so might as well upgrade ASAP like the LCAL side traditionally did.