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Why Do Airlines Overbook? (bbc.com)
From a report on BBC: A common overbooking problem on a United Airlines flight on Sunday ended with a man being bloodied and dragged from his seat and an already troubled airline earning more bad press. How did it all go so wrong? Overbooking on flights happens all the time. Empty seats cost airlines money, so they offset the number of passengers who miss flights by selling too many tickets. In this case, the problem arose because United decided at the last minute to fly four members of staff to a connection point and needed to bump four passengers to make way for them. When there's an overbooking issue the first step is to offer an inducement to the passengers to take a later flight. [...] Of the 613 million people who flew on major US carriers in 2015, 46,000 were involuntarily denied boarding, according to data from the Department of Transportation -- less than 0.008%.
They all wanna do it but they don't wanna be caught doing it.
That's the beginning and the end of this conversation.
The only way to get airlines to stop doing it is to make it unprofitable to do so either through fines and/or regulations which increase the compensation for those bumped from flights to the point where it's not worth it to do.
It may be less than 0.008% but it's still forty six thousand human beings.
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"Empty seats cost airlines money" not if those seats are already paid for. This total BS. If the seat is paid for then less weight saves them money. Overbooking is pure greed. They know the average percentage of people who will miss the flight and they overbook to make more money but sometimes the people do not miss the flight and they do not have enough seats. It is pure greed and lies. If I have paid for a seat it should not be theirs to sell again as what they normally do is just get more strict about the check in time to reject people if they are going to have a problem. You arrive at check in a minute late (I was rejected 3 minutes late once) and they get hard arsed because they already have someone sitting in your seat. They have sold it and made money from something they had already sold to you.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Because it usually works out just fine, and it's so incredibly fast compared to driving. Days turn into just a few hours. Fewer hotel nights means it's cheaper than driving too, sometimes enormously so.
If you're rich and can afford to drive everywhere because you don't mind more nights in hotels and there's no limit to the time you can be away, I understand why you don't fly. But when you look down on jetsetters, you're being an insensitive snob.
We jump through hoops like trained animals, no longer having the dignity of humans, and now from this story we see that it's unreliable and a carrier might not keep its word. Yet even still, it comes out on top. Look at it this way: Airplanes were such a great technological advancement, that we'll put up with so much bullshit.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
And the law actually requires a minimum of $1,350 refund for the seat if forced off.
Maximum is 4x the cost of seat or 1350
But didn't you read their statement? They had 'no other choice' but to beat him up and drag him off.
Offering more money until someone volunteered?
Picking someone else at random without a good excuse?
Waiting for voluntary peaceful compliance?
They might -seem- like other choices to you, but not to United.
And this is where it gets interesting to me, and is worthy of a /. post.
If indeed they overbooked the flight by 4 seats, AND they had the plane full, asking for volunteers, and indeed got 3 volunteers, this is all over one passenger, already in their seat.
What would United be gaining by removing a passenger from a seat to grant passage to another? A single passenger is that valuable to them? Really? Why?
I get that overbooking makes money - some of the 5 digit /. users here will recognize the parallel with oversubscribing any data service, you make your money on the 60-90% of the time the service isn't congested, balancing that with pain and subscriber loss. For an ISP, this is de rigueur.
But for this instance, this is clearly NOT just about filling seats, rather there is something else going on. United wanted another passenger in that seat. Why? Loyalty member? Crew being shuttled? Executive? A favor?
So is anyone asking about this? Will we get an answer?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
They could have planned ahead, they could have flown them another airline, they could have chartered a private plane. They had choices.
The Aviation Security officer has already been placed on leave and his outfit as publicly stated his actions were not in line with their policy (re: he's f*cked).
Security and police are just about never f*cked. The first rule of a police state is that you don't throw the police under the bus. They may get bad press but where the rubber meets the road, or perhaps I should say where the baton meets the suspect, they still have free rein. Virtually all suspensions result in a slap on the wrist are are in effect paid vacations.
No one except airlines WANTS THEM TO OVERBOOK, because the only entity that overbooking benefits is the carrier. Overbooking does not benefit the customer (no, overbooking does not "help them keep fares low", competition does). The obvious solution in this case was to continue offering higher and higher incentives until they reached the point where people were willing to give up their seats. Dragging a bloody paying passenger off the plane is going to end up costing them far more than just raising the offer until they got enough volunteers.
In this case overbooking wasn't even necessarily the case. The plane was fully loaded when 4 employees showed up and told the gate agent that they needed to be on that plane, because it was the last plane to their destination that day. They weren't booked for the flight, they just showed up and said they needed to be on it. Overbooking doesn't even apply to this case. The problem is how United handled the situation, by deciding to call in the police and drag a paying customer off the plane instead of just offering whatever it took to get 4 people to agree.
This whole whine session is silly.
I'd like to see if you still feel that way if you decide that getting to your destination is worth more than $800 to you and instead the police come on board, bloody your mouth, and drag you off the plane.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
According to the contract, it was within UA's rights to remove the passenger from the plane. However, it was a royal PR fuckup to do it in the way that they did, and consequentially, they deserve whatever fallout comes from this.