Buddy Bidding

Posted in A Day in the Life of a Flight Attendant | 0 comments

TweetShare

Working as a flight attendant brings a lot of variety. Not only do you visit different cities and meet new people, but you also get different crews.

I’ve written about it here before, flight attendant’s bid for their monthly schedules. Your preferences are inputted into a computer system and then in seniority order it assigns flight attendants to trips. Usually, if you bid for the same types of trips every month, you’ll end up working with a lot of the same people. However, most of the time you end up working with different people each month.

There are some airlines though that allow their flight attendants (and pilots) to “Buddy Bid.” Buddy bidding allows flight attendants to specify a preference in their monthly schedule bid such as “AWARD FLYING WITH EMPLOYEE #: XXXXX.” This tells the computer that you don’t really care where you fly, as long as you fly with that specific employee. It usually drops the more senior buddy down to the more junior buddy’s seniority and assigns the trips from there. The regional airline I worked at allowed us to do that, but my current one doesn’t.

But, there are ways around it. My current airline allows us to bid specific flight pairings. So, if you and your “buddy” bid for the same pairing there’s a chance that you may end up working together. You both just have to hope that no one in between the more senior buddy and the more junior one bids for the same trip. Bidding this way also takes some research and practice. Before I started buddy bidding I had my junior friend do a “test bid” (build his schedule for a month the same way I do) to see if he could hold the same type of trips I usually bid for. Luckily, he usually can hold Wednesday through Saturday flying.. Which is what I love to do.

For the most part, we end up with 1 or 2 trips a month together. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. Flying with your friends makes flying more fun and less of a job. But at the same time, it also spoils you.

My last four day trip was one of the trips awarded with my “buddy,” Brad. Brad and I have been friends for about 4 years now and though we’ve worked at the same airline for most of those 4 years.. We hardly ever flew together. But now, we make it a point to at least try to make it happen. In addition to Brad, I lucked out. The other flight attendant awarded the trip was Savannah, whom if you remember loved my PACKiT. Savannah and Brad had worked together before separate from myself, and the fact that we were all now on the same trip was something the three of looked forward too. We all liked working with each other in pairs, but we had never worked as a trio.

The four days went by quickly with layover in New York, Los Angeles and

Mr. Brad, Myself and Ms. Savannah

Seattle. We spent time on each layover just hanging out with each other, which is something I came to find out none of us really do any more. It seems we’ve all become “slam-clickers.” A “slam clicker” is now an industry term for a crewmember who doesn’t hang out with other crewmembers on layovers and lets their down “slam and click” closed behind them. But, since we were all flying together.. We never slam clicked on each other. We had a pretty long layover in New York and made the best of it out at a bar on Long Island.. And inhaled some decently tasting Thai food in Seattle. And, as for working the flights — we had a typical New York – LA flight with a few issues, but as the lead flight attendant on board I was never nervous or questioning how they handled situations because I already knew how they worked and what their personalities are like since we’re also friends outside of work. Additionally, we helped each other cope through the experience.

All said and done, buddy bidding is definitely something I’m going to continue to do. And, we’ve already made it known that the three of us want to continue to work together.. and have begun trading our trips around to make that happen for September. After working with your friends it’s a huge adjustment getting back into the groove of working with people you don’t know. Trying to figure out their work ethic and customer service style and coming up with a good ice breaker to ensure the three of us work together for the duration of our trip can sometimes be challenging. But for the most part it’s never a problem and I always get along with my co-workers. You can always judge how well liked someone is by looking in “open time” (a list of uncovered flying). If you’re in there a lot it can sometimes mean people don’t want to work with you.. But if you’re hardly ever in there, like myself, I like to believe it means you’re well liked or maybe it’s just that people can’t drop their trips with you because of “low staffing.” For now, I’ll believe the former part of that sentence.

TweetShare