Seniority certainly helps with anything. And bidding a junior base helps with seniority (LAS is currently the most junior UAL base by a considerable margin). For comparison, I’d be at about 50% for LAS 737 CA and around 70% in DEN. And in my NB and WB bidding/trading experience, shorter 1-2 day trips go fairly junior in PBS awards.

You will not fly better trips at NK vs UAL. Especially out of LAS.

once the company gets their new provision to force new hires to be captains, LAS will disappear. They simply opened it up to get butts in the left seat, now that they can force guys into the left seat wherever they want them LAS will go buh-bye

That’s a pretty bold prediction. Closing a base costs the company a lot of money, when I came aboard people thought that was why CLE hadn’t closed. CLE has grown in the last couple of years. I doubt many people will be forced into CA, but I’m confident we will see new hires being awarded LAS from Indoc once WB new hires can no longer bid there to break their initial seat locks.

CLE has grown because they can get captains there.

Well, yeah. Same with a few other bases too, including MCO. LAS is going to be interesting to watch, the last tidbit I saw from the Co was that they didn’t see much LAS base growth coming. I tend to agree, but they are a long ways from closing it.

Extremely unlikely, Las wasn’t opened solely to get butts in seats. Consider the fact that most people who came to LAS originally were already on the 737 as a captain or lateraled from another aircraft. What’s far more likely is a massive displacement in IAH captains.

what was LAS all about if not butts in seat?

It also promotes recruiting of new hires, provides an alternate location from which to cover SFO, LAX, and DEN flying, and saves the company buying a token number of hotel rooms.

Space to park the shear number of jets showing up that eventually won’t all be able to be staffed by normal overnighting crews. Vegas only has 100 captains almost all filled by lateral captain bids. IAH on the other hand grew by nearly 350 new captains.
The company unnecessarily grew IAH to get butts in seats. Before the company decided to do that lax was projected to be staffed to 340 captains. Now only 220. They sent all the unfilled LAX/SFO/EWR positions to IAH and smaller degree DEN to get butts in seats. Only
time will tell whether the company really wants 700+ captains in IAH, it was definitely a move to alleviate the unfilled CA vacancy problem though.