Our PTO is unlimited, but every day off requires finding my own replacement

My company describes paid time off as unlimited.

The request form has no balance. The handbook says employees should take the time they need while meeting responsibilities. During recruiting, the policy was presented as a sign of trust.

On my team, the practical rule is different: no request is approved until the employee finds someone to cover every recurring task.

That sounds reasonable for essential work. The problem is that our team has no spare capacity. Everyone owns a different set of clients, reports, and system access. Covering a coworker means doing their work on top of your own, and most people are reluctant to promise that before they know what their own week will hold.

I requested five days in July for a family trip. My manager said the dates were fine if I arranged coverage. I asked three coworkers. One could cover the client inbox but not the financial report. Another could run the report but lacked access to one system. The third already planned to be away for two of the days.

After a week of negotiating, I withdrew the request.

The time was technically available. The organization to make it possible was not.

This happens across the team. People take long weekends because three days are easier to hide than a full week. Someone recently worked two mornings during a vacation because the backup could not answer a client question. Our manager points to the policy and says nobody is discouraged from taking leave.

Discouragement does not require anyone to say no. It can live inside a process that makes the employee responsible for solving the staffing problem before resting.

I want to raise this without turning it into a debate about the phrase unlimited PTO. The label is less important than whether people can use ordinary blocks of leave. I plan to bring anonymized team patterns, propose named backup pairs with shared access, and ask management to own unresolved coverage conflicts.

If two employees request the same week, a manager should make the tradeoff. If a critical task has no trained backup, that should become a continuity problem, not proof that the owner cannot take leave.

What would make this policy usable in practice? Is it reasonable to ask employees to identify coverage while requiring managers to approve the final plan, or should coverage be entirely a management responsibility?