To the point at which they need to reject passengers ? I can only think that it’s due to poor management and organisation ? Does anyone have any legitimate reason ?
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Airplane has 100 seats. Airline sells all 100 seats for $200 each. Full plane. Airline makes $20,000.
Airplane has 100 seats. Airline sells seats all 100 for $200 each. Airline sells 5 additional seats to people who really, really want on the flight (business traveler closing the big deal, someone wanting to visit grandma on her death bed) for $1,000 each.
Oh, no. We have only 100 seats but 105 passengers. Let’s wait to see if someone doesn’t show up …. time to fly 3 people didn’t check in on time, sucks to be them, we’ll stick them on the 11pm flight that routes through Atlanta.
Now, we have 102 passengers but only 100 seats. Hmmm, hey passengers! Anyone want to take the next flight in 2 hours? We’ll give you a gift certificate for $200. 2 people take the deal.
Full plane. Airline makes $24,000 – $400 gift certificates that passengers have to use on your airline. That’s $3,600 extra. They’d be crazy not to oversell.
Because if they didn’t there would *always* be empty seats on every flight. Are you ok with that? With your ticket prices being raised a little and to have fewer tickets available per flight? Because that’s the alternative.
The airlines cannot force passengers to show up.
Basically, they know a good number of passengers have to cancel due to emergencies or mistakes. They oversell to try and compensate for that, so no plane leaves partly empty.
Say you have a 100 seat flight. You know thanks to 30 years of experience that 3-9 people out of every 100 are gonna bale.
So you strategically sell 106 tickets, so that on average you have most of the seats full, so that the flight still makes enough of a profit to pay wage and fuel costs.
If everyone actually shows up (not common), and you have to reimburse some of them, oh well. The extra money you make when this does work is more than enough to compensate, and it doesn’t happen often.
Airlines maintain contractual obligations with government and other organizations to provide spots on flights. I keep hearing people talk about overbooking as if airlines do it based on a greed algorithm, and while that very well may also be true, an actual major source of overbooking comes from contractual obligations and internal employee movement.
With the government specifically, US government employees on TDY travel are *guaranteed* a spot on flights. The system they use allows them to book on full flights and the airline by contract has to kick off another passenger to make room. I know because I’ve done it. Sorry travelers.
Similarly the airline might need more crew members at one airport in order to allow a flight to take off. They will put those employees on full flights to shift them around to where they are needed. The cost value of canceling an entire flight because an employee wasn’t there to crew it versus the value of your piddly ticket is vastly stacked against you, even considering the vouchers they will comp you with.
Is this common outside of the US? I travel a lot by plane (Europe/Asia) but never noticed anything like that, but just heard it several times happening in the US
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