The only problem with the "tack 4 days off to 4 days leave" plan every month is getting the 4 days leave.
In EK, leave these days is usually applied for through the company website which shows a calendar displaying the days when leave is available to be bid for. If no leave is available on a particular day, that day appears with a solid red background. All too often, four or more months, particularly during the summer or the Christmas periods, will appear as a solid red block.
I know of one captain who first resigned as a Training Captain because after much negotiation, the training department would not allow him to take his leave in four day blocks each month. (Training captains work to a different leave schedule to line captains and FOs.) So he resigned his training captain position hoping he'd have better luck doing the same thing as a line captain. (This, when the company was/is in what can only be described as a crisis in its shortage of training captains.) With many years of seniority, he was still unable to make it work, despite many creative attempts at trip swapping every month with other line captains.
So he resigned from the company and is currently seeing out the last few weeks of his notice period.
There are unofficial trip swap sites for each aircraft type for captains and FOs in EK. (Thank you, Anders, for a great service.) When monthly rosters first appear, everyone in these swap groups are bombarded by sometimes fanciful trip swap requests: "Chennai night return (a real horror)/Lagos trip/9 day Auckland, will swap for days off". Lately, a truly disturbing trend has appeared: people offering to pay others to do their flying for them.
For reasons that may have as much to do with ego and loss of face as with good business sense, the people in top management levels within the company continue to refuse to entertain any suggestion of remote basing, even of allowing one off deals where two pilots could share a line that allowed one to break a pattern at an out port to take his days off and another, coming off his days off, to take the pattern over.
Would any such system involve more work for the schedule/roster builders? Certainly. Would it save the company millions in improved retention of senior pilots (and lately, quite junior pilots as well)? Without a shadow of a doubt.
In the very near future, you’ll all be spared the ramblings of Wiley, at least on subjects pertaining to EK, because Wiley is soon to join the ranks of those leaving. I know basing is too big an ask for EK to grasp in one step. However, if they’d come up with a roster system that allowed me to take some of my days off in a remote EK port, where I could operate a service in, hand over to one of the many other pilots who’d like to do the same thing, and then operate out at the end of my days off, they could probably keep my services for a few more years. I KNOW I’m not the only one who thinks this way.