Originally Posted by ColdWhiskey

With line bidding, one of the big advantages is when we have vacation in the month to be bid. With line bidding, it is possible to bid a line that assigned vacation days touches multiple trips. Any trips that are touched by vacation are dropped and pay protected (unless they come back through domicile and can be split).

With our current base structure, many trips leave domicile on day one and don't return until the last day. If you can touch one of these trips with your first vacation day and another trip with your last vacation day, it is fairly easy to turn one week of vacation into 3 weeks off, while getting the vacation pay in additional to pay protection on the affected trips prior to, and after actual vacation days.

In addition, you can slide your vacation up to 3 days either way. Basically, with strategic bidding, we can triple our actual assigned vacation days, while getting pay protected for all of the trips that vacation may touch.

This also creates a lot of open time drops, that can then be used by other crew members to add, drop, or swap trips to enhance their own schedule. If you are a line holder, this allows huge schedule flexibility or modification.

Many crew members also elect to pick up flying on days that were cleared by vacation and associated conflict drops, thus adding more credit.

A similar thing can be done with transition and training conflicts.