I'm no expert on shorthaul but I'll give it a go:
If you had 4 single day trips, followed by a few days off, is it easy to swap out the day trips for a four or five day trip etc to aid commuting?
A shorthauler should be able to tell you for certain - Sounds to me like dropping a load of day trips to pick up a unallocated single trip from the company pot ( using the computer system, eMaestro) might be a challenge..I
guess you might perhaps get more luck swopping directly with an individual....
Similarly, if you have banked hours, can you just ping a duty from your roster into the either? IE you have 10 hours banked, and want to get rid of an AMS for example. can you just.... get rid of it?
That's a very definite "that depends"
. You're trying to drop work back into the pot and not picking anything else up in return. The company really isn't keen on having "uncovered" work. If there's already "x" amount of unallocated trips in the pot on the days involved (where "x" is a monthly changing variable defined by BA, often 1), and/or the days involved are one's where pilots might not be keen to pick up the work you want to drop (e.g. bank holidays, some
... weekends) then you might not be able to drop the work, regardless of your banked hours....the computer or someone in the office will simply say "no".
I suspect that's as clear as mud and in any event the rules on this are changing from month to month at the moment, dependent on pilot numbers and the whim of certain managers, but HT is of some H.