Busboy, OK here goes. Pardon the delay, I had to get out the little blue book and do a quick review of secondary line vacation stuff. So if I miss speak let me know, haven’t done the VTO/vacation thing in a long time.

Well yes you spent 42 vacation CHs for your 7 days of vacation and you worked 5 days during the month. Don't get me wrong that's great. However, (and remember, the following is all a matter of prospective)

1. While it is possible to slide a vacation during a VTO month, I didn’t see anything about expanding a vacation with a VTO line. My guess is ‘cause it’s tough to expand (spend additional vacation CHs) when you don’t know your VTO schedule. The VTO line is built after the vacation days are identified. You know your 7 vacation days; you just don’t know what lies on either end of your vacation and how close those days of work will come to your days off (until the VTO lines are published). Worse case, you get 7+4=11 days free of work. The +4 represents the two 48 hour duty free buffers on either end of the 7 day vacation.

2.Now with the right bidding it’s possible to spend less and get more days off. Classic (and simplest) case week on, week off line. Vacation knocks out 1 week of work, (cost: 35-38 CH), result 20-21 days off all in a row. Now that's a vacation.

Again these are round numbers and are highly dependent on the bid pack construction and where you bid.

Running out of time… It’s all a matter of options. IMO, with PBS, as a crew force will have fewer vacation related options. We may be able to retain the ability to slide a vacation, but never take a month off. I commute so I like options and FastBid was great at max’ing the days off to vacation hours spent ratio. Sorry to see it go.

This is just my perspective of our vacation options..everyone else's will be different. No better....no worse, just different.

Glad to see the VTO/vacation bidding is working for you and happier still to see you are against PBS. Hang in there…the fights brewing.