Exactly how is it worthless?

With the coverage that we have there are very few trip trades as most are turned down with the no coverage stamp. There is very little info with the system such as how many tradess are available on a day to day basis.

It also gets a little old watching the alpa drops, lca drops and such that show up in open flying but with no coverage we are unable to move trips around so when they drop the trips it makes it even harder to improve quality of life as thy have added trips without picking anything up so then there is less coverage.
Last but not least we have plenty of management types that when they fly they cherry pick or displace a friend instead of picking from open flying which again does not help with the coverage for the average line pilot.

Now I have to agree with your last two paragraphs regarding ALPA drops and management cherry picking trips. I can add on to this by saying that ALPA MEC meetings should be be held at the Schaumburg, IL Best Western and not the Hilton in Kona.

I have to disagree a little regarding the trip trading. It can certainly stand improvement. For every trip I drop I usually have about 5 or 6 different trade requests in place to get rid of it. If one of those trade requests is successful then the other 4 or 5 are irrelevant since the trip is gone. Our own MEC said that only about 20% of trades requested get executed as part of their argument to end trip trading 2 years ago. So based on my trading strategy, according to our MEC, trading is useless.

Many pilots believe that they can wait until 2 days before their trip to enter a trade request and have a high expectation of getting out of it. Chances are that someone was sitting on the computer at noon on the 20th of the previous month putting in trip drop requests for that same date but they have an early time stamp so they will get it before they other guy who waited.

This being said, it can certainly stand improvement and will probably be scrapped when we most likely go to CALs system.

I put many trades in on the 20th for the time stamp and have always been active trading but 777 in ord as far as cap there is very little trades that go through.

Have already heard we will be switching to cal is what I have been told for what it is worth.

have had many discussions about this system and it seems like most people know of the problems and that I am sure with it's limitations does not help sick use one bit.

Trip trade at UAL is dependent on base.

Small base = 0 trades.

Big base = if your trade helps the company then yes.

or

Big Base = if you are senior then you can "trade" during "Big Pick".

Based at ord but very few trades.

Based in Denver with a moderate amount of trading