Originally Posted by gloopy

Of course you can come up with individual pairing examples where credit could be the same. In those cases, only hotel/transportation costs would be reduced. While a win for the company and not a loss for the group in and of itself, this type of scenario would only be a fraction of the VB trips.

We would then get other trips that would absolutely cut down on DH and overnight length (credit/rig money, etc) and that does reduce pilot jobs. That the company can pick and choose the city, month, plane and base to do it from lets them sharpshoot credit and reduce pilot headcount. There really is no other purpose for it. Its not to slightly reduce hotel costs (most of the cities even mentioned already have pretty low hotel costs anyway).

VB exists as a concept to reduce pilot jobs. I'm very pro-commuter, but we need to eliminate VB's from our CBA ASAP. The carrot of a few guys on a few fleets in a few cities a few moths a year not having to commute isn't worth the stick of even slightly fewer pilot jobs.

The company already has the ability to cover 100% of the flights they need to cover in any market even seasonal. They just have to provide hotels, per diem, transportation and keep us on the clock. If that's not good enough, they are free to open a real base anywhere they want whenever they want for as long as they want.

We've given up enough in "productivity".