Originally Posted by sailingfun

They run several practice bids after posting every time. I suspect in this case they will run at least half a dozen. They just don't post the results. Years ago you could call them or walk over and see a practice bid. They stopped that because they found that in the last day before a bid closed over 30 percent of the pilots changed what they wanted. People who thought they were getting a bid and then did not get it would complain even though they were told it was not the final bid. It created to many headaches for them. You can however be sure they will run many bids before they make a final posting.
They want to move as many pilots as possible because now is the perfect time. They have a surplus of pilots so can keep a bunch in school and fly the schedule. The cost to do this is minimal. The majority of training costs are fixed. The portion of training costs that can flux is much cheaper when you have a surplus of pilots. If you are doing a lot of training and short then those costs go way up as the number of Greenslips explodes. It was not unusual in a heavy training time to have 5000 plus green slips a month when we had 7000 pilots.
They anticipate next winter that they will be hiring pilots. That creates lots of training events. If they are going to move people now is by far the most logical time to do it. The good news is that this bid is going to be a gain in positions. We have not seen that in a long time!!