Let’s say you’re a 2 year CA. You get a primary vacation which drops any trip it touches. Let’s say May 15-22 for the sake of discussion. You bid for a line that has a trip that ends May 15 and another that starts May 22. Both of those trips get dropped. Which is great, if you can afford to lose 2 trips for the month, you basically end up with 21 days off work.

If you can’t, you’ll pick both of those trips back up at 1.5, make a few extra bucks, and be back to your original 7 days of vacation.

The pilots that have nice nest eggs and paid off student loans and 3 primary vacations a year love line bidding because it gets them basically a month off.

PBS is a different way of bidding. You basically put in preferences and it generates a schedule that tries to respect those preferences as much as possible. This leads to more efficient trips and depending on your seniority a better overall schedule. At bare minimum if you’re junior and need a few specific days off you’ll likely get them (although the rest of your month may suck). However, you lose trip touching. So now your primary vacation is just those 7 days. Basically it’s a loss to the senior pilots and a gain to the junior ones.