I submitted a smartsheet yesterday and received this response just now:

“Hi Konabear,
This is a technical issue that has since been fixed. Please try again and let me know if you are still having issues.
Thanks, CS”

I just tried again and it worked like it’s supposed to. YMMV

 

awesome, glad it was just a glitch. Normally I try to assume it’s an error not malice, but since it happened immediately after their PB day email I was concerned it was intentional.

 

I've never understood the value in purchasing vacation days. It takes a lot of money away from the paycheck just to add a few days to a vacation. I'll take the money now and just bid some days off around my existing vacation. What am I overlooking?

 

more paid vacation days in a vacation month also means less to even no flying in said month. if there's no change in pay rate, it's all awash but to each their own.

 

The money it takes away from the paycheck now will be recouped later. I throw the purchased days on the end of my vacation late in the vacation year. I can then either use them as IVDs to drop trips with inadequate reserves or leave them where placed to make it easier to get in the LCW. It’s also easier to pick up a SS in a month with vacation.

 

Some people don't have the seniority to guarantee those extra days off around their vacation. Some people like to have some extra days tagged on to use as IVDs throughout the year without cutting into their base 7 day award. Some people have a vacation week that splits bid periods so maybe they want to turn a 3/4 split into 2 longer VAC blocks of 5/6/7 days each.

 

Buy vacation with FO hours and cash them in as a Captain. Doing this on top of filling the bank is a form of pay rate arbitrage when upgrading or even moving up in the same seat. Think of purchased vacation days like a bank transaction that lets you go above the LCW when withdrawing.

 

Are supplemental vacation days still limited to the same number of IVD occasions?

 

like others have said, it mainly benefits pilots who are in coverage award territory. I use purchase vacation days to,

buy the Saturday before and the Sunday after a vacation so I can reliably plan to have 2 weekends off.

buy out more days on a summer vacation week when I cannot hold 2 weeks

buy out a few extra days in a month with 2 vacation weeks to guarantee PBS won’t be able to award me trips and I get the whole month off

bid a vacation week before or after a holiday I cannot hold off then buy out to get that holiday off. (Does not work for Xmas or new years)

attach more days to my last vacation so I can use IVDs without interfering with my planned vacation.

 

I did this as well. Seems the glitch is fixed thankfully.

Too go into probably too much detail, I only had one month last year where I had over 80hrs of straight pay, so I figured I better bank everything over 80. At the very least if I withdraw it the next year there's a slight bump in pay. I decided to use that to try out buying vacation.

I was hoping to get one week of summer vacation (did not ) and buy a week before/after that to make it 2 weeks. There's no way in h3ll I'd be able to hold TWO weeks of summer vacation. If you buy vacation during initial bidding or between 21FEB to 31MAR where the days are placed does not require Company agreement. That would basically get me the whole month off, and more importantly I would have 100% confidence that I'd have those 14 days off. For a family vacation we don't mess with nonrevving so we could buy tickets right now instead of when the July bids come out and then travel to Europe or whatever.

Maybe next summer. Man, I wish we had better vacation rules and nonrev PS passes/FCFM, etc. (I put it in my contract survey)