Airlines offering vouchers for you to give up your seat. Why? How does the pricing scheme work?
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Many airlines overbook their flights, in case someone has to cancel or re-book their flight for another time, or they miss the flight due to a connecting flight being delayed. If it comes down to it, they offer vouchers if a passenger is willing to give up their flight, in which case they get rebooked on a later flight *and* compensated for their “trouble”. However, if not enough people willingly give up their seat and they have to bump someone, the airline will compensate the individual more than if they gave up their seat willingly. The pricing scheme works because plane tickets are already overpriced if the flight is full. The last numbers I saw, which were from 2013, based on average ticket prices, if a flight is roughly 70% full, any further ticket sales are pure profit. The way that airline tickets are priced are profit enhancing: tickets are more expensive during “high-demand” timeframes, and less expensive during “low-demand” timeframes. The flights are going to go from Point A to Point B regardless of passenger count (they’re not going to cancel a flight simply because a plane holds, for example, 65 people and only 20 bought tickets), so they lower prices during “low-demand” timeframes in an effort to make *some* money on the flight. To make up for those situations, they jack up the prices during “high-demand” timeframes, thus making even more money on completely full flights.
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