Preferential Bidding....Good or Bad???
 

Aight this goes out to all you RAH guys and anyone else using the Navtec Bidding Software.

Air Wisconsin's Cronies That Be.....are trying to push us to Drop our current FLICA Line bidding for the Navtec PBS. They've come up with this whole elaborate presentation on how great it is...the problem I see with it is that we will lose our trip touching for vacation (one of the reasons why the company wants this)

Anywho.....to any of you guys who use it....how do you like it....does it only really benefit the senior guys???

Anything you guys can add would be greatly appreciated...

PS- Im starting this thread because im sick and tired of looking at posts from Pro-Gojet pilots and other assorted Ignorant types :p

Personally, I like it. The thing I like most is being able to easily avoid things you do not like, e.g. other pilots, layovers, check-in times, etc. It makes bidding and trip trading much much easier.. It would be even easier if we were properly staffed.

If you have an incompetent, criminal management pbs sucks. Too much behind-the-scenes manipulation.
If you have management that somewhat respects their pilots, prefbid can be a good thing. simple enough? :)

I agree, I like it a lot. Once you learn the systems defaults and how they can restrict you from layer to layer you'll learn to work it to your advantage. I'm a JR line holding CA (I bid around 59 out of 71 lines in FAT) and I average 90-95 hours of credit on around 80-85 hours of block, commutable 4 day trips (BTW I live in ATL) and 14-15 days off per month. I also got 6 days off over Labor Day and Sundays off (NFL) for the entire month. Not bad for a JR CA.

i like pref bid as well. But some of the fall backs are
1)it takes about 4 or 5 months to realize how to get the most out of your bid.
2) company messes with the bid sometimes ie. holding trips with CKA for FOS on IOE
3) Bidding windows will sometime hose you! say the min window is 82 hours well it gives you four four days worth 81 hours and 45 minutes, it will throw another trip on there to get into the window and sometimes you have 2 to 3 less days off than most people in your bid range just for 6 hours more of credit.
4)if you ask for too much and dont get it it can really screw up your whole month
5) at RAH all your vacation and training is preawarded so those months are interesting. I had vacation and a PC in May and got stuck on reserve with 14 months of seniority! Oh well

But some of the good things are avoiding employee numbers, bidding specific overnights with time ranges, i always bid SBN overnights IF layover is > than 15 hours, beeing able to bid average credits, you can bid to fly with certain people, avoid landings in TOL, check in and out times, trip credits.

The thing i understand most about any pref bid system is it works for the really senior and the really junior, any one in the middle is kind of a toss up. The senior get exactly what they want, the junior dont expect to get anything so they get what they want in a sense and the people in the middle get a little bit of both

A RAH f/o in PHL told me he had line bidding (cant remember if it was flica or not) before he went to RAH, and liked it a lot more than PBS!

anybody here has gone from line bidding to PBS that can compare the two??

PBS is great when it works and sucks when it doesn't. Sometimes the company can change a thing or two around that really make it work against you. Some months I have 17 days off with nothing but commutable trips then some months I have 6 day stretches where I have to get my own hotel in the middle. I can't explain why but there have been instances where the computer simply didn't follow the rules. Over all I like it but as mentioned above you have to learn how to use it. Every month is something new. You just have to keep trying till it work out for you.

me....seems to be really good if you are super senior or super junior. Middle of the road is a crap shoot. And if you have morons in management like I do, they tweak parameters and wont tell you about it, so you maynot always get the big picture and be able to bid accordingly. I will say that I do like pref bid better now, but i'm top 15% company wide and top 40% in base....but you are definitely more at the whim of management, such as no more bidding around/over training days and vacations.

See....now im in the top 10 in my base which would be good for me....however...like i said earlier...I dont wanna lose trip touching....I think they are also trying to get away from trip/duty rigs as well...which would really suck. i turned 4 days vacation this month into 12 days off....im just afraid PBS wont be able to come close to that

My main problem with it is simple. How can we, as the pilot group make sure that management isn't messing around with it? How can we still have trip touching? With line bidding I know what I'm getting, usually isn't good anyways, but I know exactly what I'm bidding for, PBS to me seems like a crap shoot.