To make it simple, after year 1 you get 2 blocks of 7 days. You can bid them together or separate. It is much more nuanced than that but that is the basic gist.

If you're hired at the wrong time, you'll be on 7th year pay before you actually get your 3rd week of vacation. Woohoo! Vacations are bid in blocks of 7 and ONLY blocks of 7. If you're out for any reason during there year you may get docked days, which means you no longer can bid that week as a separate vacation block. For example, if you're docked 1 day of vacation, they simply tag the remaining 6 day onto your first week of vacation. The catch is, BOTH weeks have to be available...seems legit! :confused: If you happen to be in a leave status during vacation bidding, you'll get what's lefter over and like it! Best you can hope for is a move-up.

Our vacation needs a lot of work!

Is there a “vacation trip coverage” report to allow us to see what kind of seniority you need for summer, Christmas...?

For each of those 7-day blocks of vacation, you'll be paid the minimum value of a 5-day trip, 26:15. In your 6th or 7th year of employment, you'll finally get a third week of vacation, which will pay less than a 5-day trip (24:30). 5 years later, 11 or 12 years after being hired, you'll be up to four weeks of vacation worth significantly less than 20 days of work... unless we finally get the vacation we're negotiating for. Our table position would value each week of vacation like 7 days of flying...36:45/week.

For comparison, I THINK FedEx's vacations currently pay 42 hours per week?

There’s a vacation wide report on the crew resources page that lists each categories vacation, color coded by cycle. I use it to prioritize which cycle I bid each week I want by looking at the previous year. Not an exact science but it helps.