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
Every empty seat on the plane is considered a loss. Quite significant because of the costs of flying. Basically flying the plane there has a base cost of X, whether there are passengers or not. Each passenger adds a much smaller cost (Significantly less than the ticket).It’s a big deal for airlines to just to book every flight as close to full as possible.
It’s always assumed some people won’t show up, so if you can get paid for 110 tickets, but only have 100 seats on the plane, you’re making 10 tickets worth of profit. But what if 102 people show up and now you have to give 2 people rewards. Well that’s okay because you still got paid for 8 extra tickets and only had to pay out for 6…
But it’s even better than that for airlines. Because $800 in rewards might only accrue $100 in actual costs to the airline. Most of the people who accept the deal aren’t regular flyers either, because regular flyers usually have plans they can’t delay. So the airline doesn’t even lose much in ticket sales.This is also why they often black out flights likely to be full for rewards customers. Because they’d rather not kick a paying customer for one using rewards. But if the flight is probably going to have empty seats, it costs them relatively little to put your butt into one of them.
So TL:DR: The airline gets it right often enough that the money made by selling extra tickets is more than the money spent on giving rewards.
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