From my look at it when the merger was first announced, the one big benefit I saw is that for the guys that want to ***** (can we say that here? edit... guess not... rhythms with "door") they can pick up flying over their vacation once the month starts. Other than a last step in the recall process, you can't fly on vacation days at Hawaiian. The downside of being able to fly over vacation though is that senior guys will bid for prime weeks they don't really want, knowing that there will be flying to pick up over those days later on. It prevents junior guys from getting those weeks and then the days don't actually get used for vacation anyways.

I think there are some cool credit tricks they can use vacation days for in PBS that we can't, but I don't really fully understand it.

As a more junior pilot in seat, I like the Hawaiian way I think, because even at my low bidding position, I was able to get weeks in June and August when it got to me because a lot of senior guys who didn't really need/want vacation didn't bid more than the minimum 7 days, and left a ton of slots open for everybody else. I'd guess about 60% of those guys will use the rest of their vacation bank for Pop Up or just grabbing slots later on, and 40% will just cash it out at the end of the year.