July '10 Bid's Strategy in Bidding and Christmas Tree

Greetings July 19th,

This past week I received my tax return. Having bought a house and being the head of household we got quite a bit back. So, like anyone else interested in helping the economy, I bought an iPad. This past week I had a four-day trip and so I brought along my iPad. It works great! I did all of my bidding on it. But I waited to get home to my Mac book before I did my posts because I haven't been able to do the cropped screen shots from my iPad.

So July's bid was one that I changed my strategy on. Like every month, your bid should take into account the monthly and seasonal changes. Looking at the Nuts and Bolts for July it was easy to see that I'd need to add locals into my bid. There were just so many of them and in order for me to be awarded a legal line without falling to my seventh layer (or worse) I would need to change the way I typically bid.

As you can see, I am not bidding to my seniority ratio. Generally that is an excellent rule of thumb but I do not because I typically bid for multi-day trips and the large majority of FA's senior to me bid for locals. It was still risky bidding for 49% in my seventh layer, but I was confident that with July being such a bountiful month I wouldn't have any problem.

I have continued to use my Standing Bid and a starting point for my bidding. My Standing Bid only contains my line properties which is what I have overlooked in the past. It wasn't pretty. I also made a slight modification to my layer three. When I was looking at the View Pairing Set for layer three, I noticed a couple of trips I didn't want to fly... at least in that layer. So the easiest way to remove them from that layer was bidding to avoid YXE.

Well, the bids are out! Time to see if my strategy worked!