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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%.
Flying is an awful experience these days because market drives price optimization above anything else. A lot of it is driven by "find cheapest" aggregators and "you must fly cheapest" corporate policies. This is actually not in the best interest of consumers. Actually, vast majority of consumers would be better off with slightly more expensive but consumer-focused service.
Security theater at the airports, outrageous fees, cramped seats, inadequate cleaning between flights. Why would anyone fly unless they absolutely had to?
And yet they don't refund the tickets for the people who don't show up. What other industry is allowed to sell commodities twice? Usually that is considered fraud....
The fair and most capitalist thing to do would be for the airline to simply have an in-cabin auction for your seat - have the captain announce higher and higher prices for your seat, and the first four call buttons to get pressed win the auction. (first N call buttons if a different number of seats than 4 are needed)
Thrown in a business class upgrade and I'm sure it wouldn't take long to get a few empty economy seats, and everyone's happy.
And the law actually requires a minimum of $1,350 refund for the seat if forced off. The guy was still in the right to refuse to give up his seat at any price lower than that, and the Chicago police helped United Airlines violate Federal Law.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Overbooking incidents are resolved at check-in counters. This is an incident of someone being removed from a plane to make way for employees. Not only is this not overbooking, but it's also a mindbogglingly dickish move by an airline to de-board someone already sitting and expecting to reach their destination, even more dickish that it wasn't voluntary at all.
Exactly. People keep labeling this is an overbooking issue, but it's questionable whether that's really the case at all. And even if it was, it's likely that they didn't have the authority to remove him anyway.
Airlines have been granted limited authority by the Department of Transportation to deny boarding to confirmed passengers when they're overbooked. As you said, that sort of issue is handled at the check-in counter at the time of boarding, but if all of the confirmed passengers had already boarded and were in their seats, it should be self-evident that the plane wasn't overbooked, given that everyone was already in their seats. Moreover, even if the plane was overbooked, they still wouldn't have the authority to remove people from the plane, meaning that their only recourse would be to deny boarding to the passengers who hadn't boarded yet, namely their four employees. And really, that should have been their choice anyway, given that none of the employees needed to be at the destination until the next day and the destination was just a four-hour car ride away.
That the police went along with this is also appalling, given that they're supposed to be the sane ones who actually enforce the law. Yes, I know it's naive, but I've seen plenty of videos of law enforcement officers who've refused to obey whatever the hell a pissed off TSA agent is screeching at them to do, and have instead helped the passengers or visitors in going about their business (I seem to recall them even asking the passenger in one video if they wanted to press charges against the TSA agent, which shut that agent up immediately). What the officers did here was shameful.
They were crew for a flight that would be cancelled if they weren't there. What this is, in addition to a PR foulup, is a logistics screwup. The crew should have been booked on a flight already.
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Yes... but there's no incentive. Essentially the airline is allowed to say "No takers for $1,349? OK, well, in that case we're kicking off the four people we don't like the most, and they each get $1,350. Unless you paid less than 1/3 of that for your ticket, in which case we're giving you just 3x the value of your ticket (yeah, the limit isn't even $1,350, it's 3x the value of your ticket capped at $1,350.)
What baffles me is that United didn't even do that. Passengers said the largest offer they heard was in the hundreds.
Yes, they can offer more, but it's PR at that point. The law has been written to favor the airlines - which, incidentally, means that the apologists are sorta right, the entire thing was almost certainly legal. Not moral "because it's the law" as the apologists claim, just technically legal, and Mr Dao is probably screwed.
United had a moral obligation to solve its mistake peacefully. The fact it didn't, and the fact it's totally legal that it didn't, means we need to reform the law. End the cap: nobody should be forced to give up their seat on an overbooked flight.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
For 4000 dollars, they could have put all 4 employees on a chartered turboprop and had them in Louisville in 90 minutes.
What baffles me is that United didn't even do that. Passengers said the largest offer they heard was in the hundreds.
I travel for business a lot and often run into the overbooking situation - my company uses Delta, and the most I've seen offered was 1000 "delta" dollars. So, not even cash, but only good for future flights with tons of restrictions. As I've said in other posts, there should be no such thing as involuntary bumping - the airlines should have to keep upping the offer until they have enough volunteers.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
They didn't get 3 volunteers - United is wording it in a misleading way by saying "voluntarily left" the other 3 people did not volunteer, they were told to leave but left without being dragged out.
250.2a Policy regarding denied boarding. In the event of an oversold flight, every carrier shall ensure that the smallest practicable number of persons holding confirmed reserved space on that flight are denied boarding involuntarily.
Obviously, IANAL, but reading the source code (the CFR), it appears they yanked this guy off to make room for flight crew. Do crew have a confirmed reserved space?
That correspondent is almost certainly wrong in law. The pilot has to have a valid legal reason for asking you to leave, which in this case he did not. Yes you can be arbitrarily denied boarding, but he was already boarded and addition the bumbing was for United employees not paying customers so bumbing him from the plane was a breach of contract, and up till the point he was forced off he was not disruptive. Being a pilot does not give you god like powers.
The most obvious was I can explain it would be if the pilot had come out and said get that black bastard of my plane to a person of African descent. Still think that would be legal?