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
I used to work for an airline. We didn’t overbook every flight, just ones on routes where we had more then one flight every day (so that if someone did ever have to be left behind we could accommodate them on another flight as quickly as possible)
The ‘no show’ rate for flights was between 4% and 7% and that was pretty reliable. It was very rare for everyone booked on a flight to actually turn up.
If 99% of the time a handful of passengers aren’t going to turn up, and you can fill some of those extra seats, it just makes commercial sense to do it.
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