Originally Posted by
WeiserTraffic
This is exactly what I'm curious of and what I'm most afraid of about re: making the jump to UAL. The drop/swap/trade rules at my LCC are similar to what you describe. My primary goal is this kind of QOL so that I can rearrange my schedule as necessary to spend time with my family especially as my soon to be first born shows up. From what I'm seeing here, it sounds like the ULCC's may offer superior flexibility in terms of being able to completely rearrange your schedule outside of the footprint of your bid award. Is it correct to say that you can only trade into trips which match your original award's footprint? If so that's not necessarily the kind of "flexible" I'm hoping for if I'm trying to trade into a weekday tip in order to get out of a weekend trip for example or vice versa (this is relatively easy to do at my current airline).
Short answer: Yes you can, you can also go from a 4 day all the way down to a 1 day if you actually learn the system. I am a very junior line holder and was able to go from 14 days off to 18 last month.
United also has a Red/Green grid we call it our pool display. However we do not have a mandatory 75% set to green each month. The company can change min reserve levels to whatever they want and make weekends nearly unlikely to get off after initial award, however not impossible. If you have a 4 day trip that has -2 days across every day of that trip you can trade into a lesser day trip that is over any days that have worse coverage. For this example I can trade a 4 day that has a total of -12 for a 3 day that has a total of -13 over the duration of trip. You can also do a combination of trips to equal your 4 day. So a 3 day and a 1 day, and so on. It is merely the same that I remember that spirit did except the company is not restricted to making the whole grid red.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk