It’s not arbitrary

 

Nor is it a restriction, as you can always drop your vacation. Then it can be rebid upon either in seniority order, or first come first serve, depending on when the vacated vacation occurs.

The biggest issue is the lack of vacation slot allocation on the Alaska side, coupled with selling prior to allocation, and forced taking of all accrued vacation not already sold.

A junior pilot can easily get a week+ of summer vacation at Hawaiian.

 

Not sure what vacation trading has to do with SAN.

Anywaysssssss, I was hoping the bid would be posted yesterday since supposedly it’s opening on the 15th. Hopefully SFO/LAX don’t get hammered too hard. I’m curious to see where the Jr pilots end up.

 

Ok. But now what does that senior CA do? What does it matter if Mr. Smith flew those trips or Mrs Smith flew them? Either way, Mr Smith was senior to me so I couldn’t get those trips anyway. It’s a moot point. Question is, if Mrs Smith is doing his trips now, what does Mr Smith do? Staying home unpaid? Taking crappy trips from open time?



Sounds like a selfish argument. By that logic, you could never allow vacation trading, nor trip trading. Why stop at just vacation? Why not hunt down every trip that was initially awarded senior to you, and then traded away to someone more junior to you?

Seniority was honored when that vacation or trip was originally assigned. After that, trading means all bets are off and it’s a free for all.

 

For trip trading it has to be a trend. Mr Smith gives all his good trips to Mrs smith. Mrs Smith no longer has to fly all the undesirable trips that all her classmates have. Mr. Smith opens his schedule to accept more 200% flying (which is awarded in seniorty). Sure you can give away a trip or two but if it’s a complete schedule swap every month then that should be addressed.

The Hawaiian vacation system you can request vacation all year. There’s really no need to trade. I guess you could always reach out to someone and tell them you will be vacating a certain period and ask them to vacate their vacation in return for the info.

It kind of sounds like vacation isn’t much of a thing at Alaska. You either end up selling it all back to the company or picking up over it. If you do the math. If 2,000 pilots sell back 100 hours of vacation then that is 200,000 hours less labor that the company needs to hire. Being able to work more and credit a billion hours isn’t always a good thing. What’s better getting 70 hours credit as a Captain or 100 as an FO?

 

I usually do neither. I'll occasionally pick up over it if there's something easy that falls on the days, but normally I'm happy to get paid to not fly. I've sold it back once. It helps the paycheck but it's sort of a long haul through the months without much of a break.

I think my one main gripe with the AS vacation system is that time can't be banked and used randomly throughout the year to augment a lower credit month. Otherwise it's fine.

As Word has said earlier, it's actually nice to know you can get vacation days. At our old airline you'd get the vacation time credited, but could never use it because the company would never allow anyone but the very most senior the actual days off.

 

Plenty of people at HAL do this. You could easily have a day or two of vacation every month. Multiple months with 3 or 4 days. Or take it in bigger chunks. Even without p2p trading the vacation system is very flexible. Guess our system operates fine without trading.

 

It would be arbitrary for me and the people I fly with... it's not a problem for us and we've never even heard of it before. Like I said, I'm fine with base specific rules if the people in that base need it and vote on it.

 

Base specific rules sound arbitrary

 

This is not true. On this very website, our beloved OTZ bragged about bartering for a week of coveted July vacation with a senior buddy for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue.

You might be cool with vacation scalpers, but it bypasses seniority.