I made the lateral move to OO after 5 years at 9E and I feel like the Sked+ system at Skywest is miles ahead than Crewtrac at Pinnacle. Automatic trip trades and able to bypass scheduling for some things is one example.

That has nothing to do with the bidding system.

Crewtrac does suck though. At least the version we had. I liked the way CCS worked (CAL's system) although I do like that bad day worse day trades are automated on skedplus. Speaking of Skywest, rainmaker is the biggest POS software and wished they would trash that vendor.

Is CCS the same as PBS? Wasn't the CAL PBS system what gave PBS the bad name for the industry because they got hosed buy how it was implemented. I've heard nothing but negative thinks about theirs.

CCS has nothing to do with bidding. It was the Legacy Continental (Pre and post PBS at CAL) scheduling/trading system L-XJT was using right up until Skedplus.

Crew Communication System: its CAL's proprietary scheduling interface. I only mentioned it because the poster I quoted was commenting on scheduling interfaces (crewtrac) rather than bidding systems.

Just to clarify somewhat, CCS was the crew's interface. The company (XJT) used something called CMS.

So under CCS when you were navigating screens sometimes there was a slight delay, usually less than a second. That was the CCS software interfacing with the CMS software.

And as far as Crewtrac goes, it is somewhat substandard. But I think it was covered long ago. Sabre charges more for certain "layers" of service/features that most airlines just don't want to pay for.

Hence the crappy base model we had with Branded/DelCon.

-For everyone- I'm not totally sure how pref bid works, but if the top few guys on your seniority list only requested max days off... how many days off would your system give them? We will be getting the system soon and I only care about the amount of days off possible, not specific days. Thanks

That depends. First I assume you are referring to PrefBid by Flightline ( now Sabre). If so, you wouldn't exactly "only request max days off." You would bid productive trips with a personal credit threshold at or below the published minimum, so as to reach the minimum monthly credit with the fewest days at work. That assumes that your implementation is remotely similar to ASA's. Your work rules could be vastly different.

Would you mind sharing who you work for? I'm curious to know who is about to implement a version of PrefBid.

I'm a waterskier. I'm pretty sure it is still a long ways out because our pbs committee just finished interviewing the possible vendors last month, one of them being sabre. Lately most of our top lines have 14 days off with just a couple having 15 days off, before swaps and drops of course. I seem to remember hearing some companies awarding lines with 16, 17, 18 days off. That must be nice. Here's to hoping I too can some day hold that many days off without dropping half my credit!

I'm a junior line holder and with PBS I get 16-18 days off a month. I ussually only do 3 four days a month and can easily swap for weekends off but I get Wed-Sat out of the gate. Or if I want the money I can choose to fly and easily do about 100-105 hours of credit with minimum days off. My credit is over 120 this month,... but I have vacation :). Still 13 days off (mama needs a new pair off shoes, anyone have a trip they want to drop, ha).