Welp, let’s fix that.

They also have the staffing to allow the flexibility to drop and pick up as much or as little as you want.

Without adequate staffing, line bidding is essentially a prison. Better bust out your Rolodex and start calling your pilot buddies. Maybe they'll give you the trip you want if you throw in some Mariners tickets on the side.

Vacation doesn't have to be pre-assigned with PBS. I've worked at an airline previously that built a line and then just dropped any trips that conflicted with vacation. So no, with PBS it is not that it "would be" pre-assigned. It's just that most airlines operate that way because there are some benefits.

If you build lines and THEN drop trips for the vacation interference then you end up with some senior trips in open time after line construction that would have helped junior bidders' schedules. This can have a larger impact than you'd think because it cascades as each bidder starting with the next one below the first pilot with vacation has a larger trip pool. If you set it up to pre-award vacation then those trips are available for other lines and helps everyone's schedules whether they have vacation or not (and it can have a large impact). By giving a high enough bid credit for vacation in PBS you can make for better schedules in vacation months without having to build in conflicting trips. Another thing some airlines have done is allow an option to pre-assign a day off before or after vacation (or both) to ensure you can guarantee a minimum of 9 days off in a row if desired.

I don't work for Alaska, just wanted to makes sure there's not misinformation out there. The biggest thing about PBS is making sure that the contractual rules surrounding it are appropriate. Done right it can be a massive QOL boost to pilots while making scheduling easier for the company.

I've never heard of a company that allows PBS to run, and then drops vacation on top of it. That system would be very lucrative, more than either line bidding and/or PBS as most operate it now.

I imagine you'd have to give up something a plenty to negotiate a major to implement PBS with vacation drops after PBS run...... unless the company thought it would get PBS and then get rid of that provision as soon as a trip through BK could gut the contract again.....

PBS is a HUGE savings to the company in the end, so if implemented, it should be done with a huge payoff.

Pinnacle had that (vacation placed after the PBS run) as a regional, I remember someone else did too but don't recall who. It worked out for super senior pilots but junior pilots didn't tend to get much out of it. The change to pre-award for vacation with a decent credit for vacation days was better for most (if not all) of the pilot group from a QOL standpoint due to more productive trips being available for bidding and the vacation credit reducing the amount of credit needed to make the window. With enough bid credit given to each vacation day for PBS to work with, it doesn't hurt as bad as you seem to think to have vacation placed prior to PBS running. The bigger key is the contractual rules surrounding PBS.

And if you think PBS rules would simply be changed by a trip through bankruptcy, line bidding could be changed to PBS the same way. Bankruptcy courts seem to be more apt to go after pay rates than work rules.

Pinnacle's rule was once the PBS award was done you could leave your vacation alone and they would modify any trip that touched it so you were still responsible for your trips except what touched vacation day 1. Meaning if you had a 4-day trip and day 3 was start of vacation, you'd be on the hook for the first 2 days of that trip and they would make sure you were back in base. You also had the option to slide your entire vacation period left or right, but if you did so it had to completely cover and/or uncover a trip in order to allow the vacation slide. So in that case, post-vacation implementation after the PBS award was run didn't really help much.

And Spirit, Ryan Air, etc. would have never existed

Spirit has more vision than Alaska

well our route planner did just leave for Spirit!

Well that's a lot different than Line bidding with vacation drops, and PBS with vacation drops afterwards.

BTW, previous poster..... BK did take a bite out of rates, but at Delta, work rule changes (pbs included, vacation rules, etc) took the biggest hits at one time and after the merger, rates came roaring back, but the PBS and many of the rule changes live on.....