It just seems like it happens so often, and airlines will sometimes offer you three times the price of the ticket just to stay a few extra hours. Seems like it’d be easy to just…stop selling tickets once the plane is full??
In: Economics
Because on any given flight there is a probability of some percentage of 300 passengers not showing up and making the flight. And with good modeling, tracking, and math you can get a good prediction of how many.
eg: Say a flight that leaves at 6:30pm often has more than average people miss the flight because they didn’t plan for rush hour traffic. I’m making up numbers here but let’s say more often than not about 8 people miss that flight or don’t show up. Well that’s 8 more tickets they could sell, now they might not book 8, they might book 5 and leave 3 open (incase not as many miss the flight, or they need to move someone from a canceled flight or something). And many times they’ll be fine. An average ticket for that flight might be $250, but once the flight starts booking up or it gets closer to the date of the flight, those tickets are selling for $500 or more. That’s $2,500 they just made. Now if a bad day happens where more people show up and they have to re-book someone because of a canceled flight and they end up needing a few extra seats, it costs them if they bump them, but they don’t have to pay out on every flight, and even if they do they’ll often do so with gift certificates that cost them less than the face value.
In the end, even paying out for a bumped seat occasionally costs a lot less than what they make up for by filling those extra seats. Of course if someone gets bumped, you notice it, and if someone gets bumped and you weren’t there, they’ll tell you. I flight quite a bit, and many times I’m in a situation where I can take a later flight if they offer money. But it’s only happened to me twice. They don’t bump people as much as we think, we’re just very aware of it when it does happen.
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