· THE most common issue pilots have had with vacation bidding has been bidding vacation when the number of days available is not evenly divisible by 7. 11-D-3 in the UPA details how vacation can be divided. If you have 13 days or fewer left to be assigned, ALL 13 days must be taken as part of one vacation and there must be two weeks available in order for the vacation to be awarded. You must enter this bid as 14 days for it to be honored. A bid for 7 days would be invalid as it would leave less than 7 days assigned and that is not allowed (11-D-3-b-(1)). Also, any vacation that’s not evenly divisible by 7 must be the LAST vacation period you are awarded.
o Example 1: You have 12 days of vacation remaining. You must bid for 14 days to have the vacation awarded. You notice that there are slots available in Week 41 (2/6/15) and Week 42 (2/13/15. You bid for Week 41 for 14 days. If those weeks are still available when the system processes your bid, you will be awarded a 12 day vacation beginning 2/6/15.
o Example 2: You have 8 days of vacation remaining. You must bid for 14 days to have the vacation awarded. You notice there are slots available in Week 33 (12/12/14) but there are no slots available in Week 34 (12/19/14). You bid for 14 days in Week 33 anyway. You would not be awarded that vacation as there are not any slots left in Week 34 and the vacation would touch that week. If you bid Week 33 for just 7 days, the system would allow you to save the bid but that bid would not be processed as it would leave you with less than 7 days remaining.
o Example 3: You have 33 days of vacation remaining. In order to be awarded all the vacation at once you must bid for 35 days. You could also split the vacation up as follows:
§ 4 vacations (7, 7,7 and 12 days)
§ 3 vacations (14, 7 and 12 days or 7, 14 and 12 days))
§ 2 vacations (21 and 12 days)
No other bids would be valid with 33 days of vacation remaining.
· ALL vacation that you elected to bid in the annual process prior to the Primary Cycle WILL be awarded in the Tertiary cycle. The system will award you as many vacations as it needs to (in increments of at least 7 days) to award all your remaining vacation days. If you don’t put in enough bids or can’t hold what you do bid, the system will automatically assign you a vacation as follows:
o Beginning at week 26 (10/24/14) and working backward to week 1 (5/1/14) the system will try to assign as many of the days you have available as possible. Then it will work from Week 27 (10/31/14) to Week 52 (4/24/2015) doing the same. The system will decrease the amount of vacation it tries to assign until it is able to assign all your vacation somewhere.
· 11-E-4-c details how much vacation the company must make available for Monthly Vacation Bidding. At this time, the company intends to offer little or no Monthly Vacation until at least the Fall despite our requests to the contrary. The SSC will continue to monitor the company for compliance with these requirements.