Question from a DAL guy. After chatting with a UPS guy I heard you guys have the opportunity to "bank" your vacation to be used later, rather than being forced to plan your vacation a year+ out.

1. When do you have to use it? When you bid for the month, or can you decide you want to drop on a weekly or daily basis?

2. How does the company limit it? Is it a formula based of reserves available/required, or just a flat X number of banked vacations can be used this week?

3. Is there a mechanism in place to keep guys from getting to the end of the year and having all their vacation? I'd rather not see a system where guys can sell back vacation so how do you keep that from happening?

Thanks!

 

lots of folks def sell back their vacation

 

Banked Vacation (BV) days are known many places as “PDO” - same concept.

 

What are the restrictions for using it, is what I think he was trying to get at. If I have a week of BV can I decide to use it all in the next month? Or do they say like... only 2 days per month of BV can be used, or deny it for inadequate reserve coverage, etc.


Does UPS bid for Vacation similar to other airlines? For example at Alaska we are currently bidding next years vacation awards. If you decide to bank vacation do you decide that before that vacation month, or would you opt out of bidding for it in the first place?

 

how many people are in a seat= how many BV they must allow. There is a formula. After the minimum is met it is at companies discretion.
If you want to use them all in one month that is fine; as long as the minimum has not been met it will be approved.

We are allowed 2 weeks of BV days. Before we bid for vacation we tell the company if we want to bank any weeks. Then we go about the normal Vacation bidding, but w less the days you banked.

Any unused days are paid out at 5.5 HRS the following year.


We also cant use them from about Thanksgiving to New years.

 

Banked Vacation days are kind of cool to tweak one's schedule month to month but I think it would be fair to say that most will use their vacation for OCV to maximize time off. A guy with 3 weeks of vacation would probably use two of them in one pay period (taking the whole pay period off) and bank the 3rd week to use throughout the year.

 

You have to submit your banked vacation day request at least 5 days prior to your trip. Divide the Time-away-from-base by 24 and that is the number of banked vacation days you need to cover the trip. There is also a 4 hour buffer to cover a trip. A trip with 27.9 TAFB would use one vacation day. A trip with 51.9 TAFB would use two days.

The banked days gained in the 2016 contract are not as popular as using two weeks in a single 28-day pay period to guarantee all 28 days off (Thank you EB!). But banked days could give a junior guy vacation in June, July and August.

Unused banked vacation days on November 16th get paid out in February at 5 hours per unused banked day.

They are required to give each Fleet/Seat/Domicile 1-3 days of possible BV days, depending on the size of the domicile.

There are now many ways for each crewmember to maximize days off or pay depending on their situation.

Did I say thank you EB yet?

 

BV works great for reserve, turns, and base line-type short trips.

 

That pretty much clears it up, thanks for all the replies. That OCV option does sound pretty awesome but I doubt we ever see that. I just think having to bid my vacation up to 15 months out is beyond ridiculous...I barely know what I'm doing next week. We can slide our vacation within a bid period which is great, as well as an option to grab a few days from a later vacation to drop a day (very limited). We also have a very limited ability to move up our vacation, but I have found that to be rather useless. The bank option sounds great except the vacation sell back.

Thanks again!

 

Thanks for the replies, that's very helpful