Originally Posted by Dynamiterabbit

General question about PBS at United. As someone who’s considering UAL, it helps me to understand what kind of bidding process I’ll deal with every month until I retire.
I’ve worked under a different PBS, and I’m wondering if a UAL pilot can chime in and tell me if this is basically how it works:

1. the process begins with the big pool of available trips.
2. The #1 pilot gets whatever they want (within FAR rules etc), and those trips are taken out of the pool.
3. As each pilot bids, the pool of trips gets smaller.
4. When it gets to me, for example, I start with the pool of remaining trips. I can bid things like “avoid showtimes before 9am”, “avoid weekends”, etc, which takes those out of the pool. Then it tries to build me a line from the remaining trips, and I can say things like “award trips with layovers in MCO” or “award any 3-day trip starting on a Monday”.
5. Reserve is basically the same except I can specify days I’d liked to avoid or be awarded, and it will try to meet those requests while following company rules such as not allowing less than a 3-day block.
6. it’s unable to build me a schedule with my requests, perhaps because I said “give me my kid’s birthday off or else abandon this whole bid group”, then it goes to my next bid group, and maybe I try a reserve request to get that birthday off. And I can do a bunch of bid groups to try different things if desired.

To me, this is very simple and easy to understand. It can get complicated due to holiday coverage and complex requests, but the bottom line is that it’s just a line-by-line request, like computer coding, and it’s always possible to see where someone messed up if they didn’t get what they wanted.
Big picture, is this how United’s PBS works? Any key differences or headaches?