SWA vacation policy

[mig1f16]

All,

Does anyone have information on SWA vacation policy? Thanks much!

 

[BVT94]

You get 2 weeks vacation between 1 and 5 years of service. (Less than one year is prorated at 1 1/6 days for each month of service before Dec 31st) After 5 years you get 3 weeks. After 10 Years you get 4 weeks. After 18 Years you get 5 weeks. You have the option to drop without pay any trip that touches your vacation block and if the company cant recover you back to domicile with some restrictions, you get the trip pulled with pay. We bid vacation blocks in August for the next year. The blocks run Sunday thru Saturday. Hope this helps.

 

[mig1f16]

BVT,

Thanks for the response...definitely helped a lot! Should you get a vacation week that no trips touch (based on your bid for that month...don't know if that's possible), is that vacation still charged to you? Can you sell back "un-used" vacation at the end of the year?

 

[737tanker]

If your vacation week is also a week that you had no trips you will get paid the flat vaction rate, which is a little over 3 trips per day for 7 days. The only vacations that are sold back are floating vacations which can be sold back in Dec if they haven't been used.

 

[bluestreaking]

How hard is it to turn 1 week of vacation into let's say 3 weeks of vacation with creative bidding as a line holder? Do you end up losing a lot of money by lowering your credit, or is it covered?

Thanks,
Bluestreaking

 

[T1bubba]

It's pretty easy to turn the one week of vacation into two weeks, but anything more than that you'll probably have to give away a trip and it would drop your monthly totals accordingly. It may be possible by splitting the vacation between two bid periods and squeezing all your flying together at the start of the first month and the end of the second month. There's a lot of flexibility to increase/decrease/move around your flying- it's up to you to take advantage of it.

Lots of more senior guys (who have more than two weeks vacation a year) bid two vacation weeks with one week between them. This gives them three weeks in a row off and by bidding the right lines can turn that into 3.5-4 weeks straight. I flew with one fairly senior guy recently who was about to take two weeks vacation for 35 straight days off without losing any pay.

 

[737tanker]

The best that I've been able to do is to get 18 days off with no loss of pay for a weeks vacation. With more long hauls it is becoming more difficult to get the pairings pulled with full pay as it is becoming easier for scheduling to return you to domicle. You ca always dropp any part of a paiting tha is out side of the vacation for no pay and end up with 3 weeks off.