7 ms·

Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers?

56 points by curtis 10y ago

fencepost 10y ago
What's more interesting than the numbers is the linked article[1] about how Delta avoids problems by asking passengers on overbooked flights how much they'd want in order to give up their seat at check in time. By doing it early and without the other passengers around it eliminates possible bidding-up at the gate and lets them have a list of low cost bumps ready as soon as it's needed. [1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-the-game-of-overbooking-flights/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-t...
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Yeah I saw that. That's brilliant. First thing is getting people thinking about getting money, so they are already primed, fantasizing about it. Then the hint about "Delta will pick the lowest bid first". Those interested already are willing to play but now have to think of others outbidding them so they lower the bid. And lastly and most importantly, it lets people who never want to participate (such as well, doctors who have to be there for their patients) not participate.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    I fly Delta. They've paid me over $1,000 in cash [1] to bump me off a $500 flight. I don't think United pays that much. Instead, they get aggressive. [1] American Express gift card
    - fastball 10y ago
      Actually, airlines in the US are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price or $1350 (whichever is lower) for a domestic delay >2hrs or an international delay >4hrs. If the bump delays you by <2hrs (generally unlikely), it's 2x ticket price or $650 (again, whichever is lower). You were probably entitled to $1350, so you really didn't do that great. That is also how much the United passenger is/was entitled to.
      - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
        Blows me away that American regulators decided to cap compensation in the event of denied boarding [1]. [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2008/04/18/08-1145/oversales-and-denied-boarding-compensation https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2008/04/18/08-1145...
      - flukus 10y ago
        Are they mandated to pay cash? I've heard from a few threads on reddit that many will pay in vouchers, a dozen $100 vouchers that can't be used together.
        soneil 10y ago
        Here's the fun part. The cash/cheque option is available if it was involuntary. But the option only has to be available, usually you have to ask for it. Not telling you that option exists is legit, telling you that option doesn't exist isn't. But if it was voluntary, the monetary option is not mandated. So when they ask if anyone wants to volunteer for a voucher, accepting that offer is volunteering, and writing yourself out of the cash option. (The airline can still offer it, but they no longer have to offer it).
        vijayr 10y ago
        Not telling you that option exists is legit How can this be ethical? The customer is doing a favor by giving up their seat, shouldn't they at least tell them what options are available? If I were an airline employee, I'd need to draw out a flowchart to remember all this.
      - 1024core 10y ago
        > are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price In the case of United, if by "pay" you mean give you a voucher (or N vouchers of value 1/N of the total, only 1 of which can be used at a time) for travel on their airline, to be used in 1 year, not to be combined with other offers, yada yada... No wonder no one wanted to take them up!
    - AznHisoka 10y ago
      Do you have to pay taxes on that?
nebabyte 10y ago
> By contrast, Southwest—which has been taunting United over the Dr. Dao incident—has a slightly lower rate of overbooking than the other airlines I get the feeling that this is missing the point > Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Some weren't. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn't that United had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that apparently it's never happened before. > It hasn't happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway Did this person even watch the video? I seriously doubt regular instances of violent deplanings wouldn't be a point of pop culture by now if "against their will" always ended with a man being dragged bleeding off a plane
- deelowe 10y ago
  Seriously. Is the author trying to claim that getting knocked out and a bloody lip is par for the course or even, i don't know, has EVER happened in any of these 40,000 yearly instances?
mnarayan01 10y ago
> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Well at least we have numbers and pretty graphs.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  Where's the pretty graph for "against their will" versus "violently against their will"?
mc32 10y ago
After this incident what will likely happen is more legalese in the contract allowing for airline discretion when it comes to bumping people involuntarily. You'll have higher fares for guaranteed seats and lower fares (general cabin) will enjoy the prospect of being bumped with some pre-arranged compensation system. It'd be nice if all airlines, other than not overbooking, chose Delta's approach. Deplane option right as you check in.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  It's not "deplane" if you're not on the plane yet. Also, it's come out that United's so-called "random" method was a sort based on frequent flier status and then (potentially) price paid for ticket. If that's really the case, they targeted their least valuable one-time customers first.. aka people who "next time" was months or years down the road. As someone with status, I get their reasoning but let's be honest and not call it "random."
  - mc32 10y ago
    I am, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression most people who travel know that late bookings as well as cheap tickets are the first to get bumped if need be (besides the poor stadbys)
    - jpollock 10y ago
      As long as the contract is the same, the price I pay for the ticket should have no bearing on what happens in an overbooking situation.
      - mc32 10y ago
        I think companies tend to value their more profitable customers over their least profitable ones. If they could only book cheapskates like me, there would be no profitable airlines in the world. Not that I would mind the equivalence. On the other hand imagine the furore we'd see when a full-price customer got bumped.
  - 10y ago
colmvp 10y ago
At the end of the day, this is less about stats and more to do with process. Overbooking happens. So do delays and shitty experiences with airlines. We get it. The difference was that United had many options at their disposal and chose one of the least humane methods in a civilized society. Furthermore, the leaked internal memo by the CEO shows a clear lack of empathy and I see a lot of similarities between what happened on the plane and the PR aftermath. In both cases, instead of choosing alternative choices that would come with some cost to the company(increasing the bounty to give up the seat, apologizing profusely for the incident) in exchange for rectifying a situation, they doubled down on bad choices (violent removal, written accusations against the passengers behaviour). Honestly, this would be non-story had they just upped the compensation to anyone interested in the plane. And on a side note, it's kind of sad how one of humans greatest technological achievements, the airplane, is associated with one of the least liked experiences in North America, namely going through airports, security, and dealing with airlines.
- cmurf 10y ago
  Airplanes are great. Airlines used to be great when there was competition. But we've ignored the merit of competition law, and allowed too much conglomeration in the name of profits. And the airlines are very profitable, but they are not competitive in particular on service and customer satisfaction. The last few mergers shouldn't have been permitted.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    I'd argue that it was competition that made the circumstances you see today - first class of today resembles standard class in the 70s for about the same relative price. Airlines increasingly wanted to grow the flying population, by lowering prices. More people have access to airplanes now, and so they have turned into what was traditionally the service and experience of a bus.
    - MagnumOpus 10y ago
      Nah. The experience in a bus: Nobody asks for your ID. You can pay cash. Nobody frisks you when boarding. Nobody irradiates you to watch nude images of you. You don't need to unpack your luggage half the time. You can stow your suitcase in half a minute, and can get it back equally fast. We would be so lucky if flying had the service and experience of a bus!
diiaann 10y ago
I got $500 from United for being bumped on a SFO -> BOS flight. My resulting flight was only 1.5 hours later and I got moved to #1 on the upgrade standby list. From what it sounded like, it was a computer system that decided the amount, not a human.
- chrismcb 10y ago
  United has a formula for deciding who to bump, based on ticket class, time of check-in, among others. It isn't supposed to be random
- fastball 10y ago
  USDOT mandates that they pay you 2x the ticket price (capped at $650) for a delay of less than two hours. So not sure what you paid for your ticket, but you may've been entitled to an extra $150.
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    If somebody gets bumped involuntarily after nobody accepted a lower compensation, they can get $650. If they offer $500 and one of the passengers takes it, he can't just rock up after the flight to ask for more money.
    - fastball 10y ago
      Right. I meant, from the OP's perspective, he did more for the airline than he really did for himself. Sure, he got some money. But he really helped the airline save money and continue to justify a (in my opinion) dishonest practice. Maybe we need to start a Airline Passenger's Union, so that we have some collective bargaining power when an airline wants to bump passengers, and instead of them convincing individuals to accept less than they deserve, we convince the airlines to pay more than mandated.
markdown 10y ago
Title should read "Which US Airline Kicks Off The Most Passengers?"
cmurf 10y ago
United has made threats of police force a thing before now, and it'd would seem that's effective due to the low instance of it going any farther than that http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united-low-priority-passenger-20170412-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
1024core 10y ago
This misconception that the flight was "overbooked" has to die. The flight was NOT OVERBOOKED. It was sold out, but definitely not overbooked. The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers. EDIT: Since some asked for a citation for the latter: 14 CFR 250.2a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a
- rl3 10y ago
  >And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers. Do you have a citation for this?
  - jinfiesto 10y ago
    I also would like to see a citation for this. It's my understanding that deadheading crew members are considered must-rides and that this is an industry norm.
    - rl3 10y ago
      Likewise. A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding. [0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-denied-boarding-illegal/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-den... [1] https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_rvideos_just_filled_with_united_related/dg3xvja/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Yes, the news.
  - 1024core 10y ago
    14 CFR 250.2a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a
chrismcb 10y ago
These were not people that were deplaned, they were people that were denied boarding. Two totally different things.
slowmotiony 10y ago
I can't wrap my head around how everyone is like "Yeah, overbooking happens, that's just the way it is". Why the hell is it legal? If I booked two clients on the same timeslot, collected cash from them in advance and then stood one up and offered him a fucking coupon, I'd have a court case opened against me the next day and I'd never find a client in the same city again. Why the hell do airlines still get away with it in the age of online payments?
- megablast 10y ago
  This wasn't overbooking, as was already said. And overbooking is legal because it is not illegal. And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight, and flight margins of <$100 profit per plane (during the worst times), not per passenger, you need to overbook.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight Why is that a problem? They've paid for a service and not used it.
    - plafl 10y ago
      It is nevertheless a wasted resource that could be used better. Indirectly it will cause all tickets fares to fall down which will benefit the people that actually flies. I'm not against overbooking but forcefully expelling a passenger is just another step in the direction of making taking an airplane just such a shitty experience. The correct, common sense, ethical and business savvy way to proceed would have been to start bidding until some passengers sold back their tickets. That would have been fair instead of some fixed compensation that doesn't take into account all kinds of inconveniences you will suffer because of losing your flight. I try to avoid taking airplanes nowadays which is quite sad considering I'm an aerospace engineer. My only positive thought is that airports are a nice contained experiment everybody is forced to watch of what happens to people when there is a power imbalance, even if you live in a democracy.
woliveirajr 10y ago
Overbooking and so on: some people might not know or remember, but on ancient times it was kind of 2 separated processes: buying the ticket was one thing, booking a specific flight was another. You could change your initial choice of flight (perhaps paying some fee, not the whole ticket again). Doing a no-show wouldn't make you loose your ticket (perhaps you would, again, pay some fee). Even the need to check-in is a consequence of that time. Without that, things would be straightforward: buy the ticket, board the plane, loose the ticket if you don't. With the ticket being a different thing from a "reserved seat in a specific flight", you end up with overbooking (selling more tickets than the flight can handle because usually someone will loose the flight, or will change it to another day). You end up with companies that don't want to lose the last seat in exchange of a small fee (it's better to sell another full ticket, no?). Perhaps prices would go up a bit. Perhaps people would be more pissed off when they loose the flight. I don't know. I just know that it began as a model that made sense at the time, and small changes added-up so that we are in this situation, now.
tunesmith 10y ago
It's worth pointing out that this article is just completely flat-out wrong. Kevin Drum is just completely screwing up here. The stats he references do not point to de-planing - a term he invents only for this article. All those involuntary denial of boardings he references are before passengers board the plane. Which makes a huge difference. The paper he links to (indirectly) makes zero mention of passengers being kicked off planes. They only make reference to involuntary denial of boarding, which happens before passengers get on the plane. I think there's only one other comment in this entire thread that makes this point. Just thinking it through a bit, you can see it makes no sense. If a plane is oversold, how the hell do they let the passengers board? You'd have two people trying to sit in the same seat.

56 points by curtis 10y ago

What's more interesting than the numbers is the linked article[1] about how Delta avoids problems by asking passengers on overbooked flights how much they'd want in order to give up their seat at check in time. By doing it early and without the other passengers around it eliminates possible bidding-up at the gate and lets them have a list of low cost bumps ready as soon as it's needed. [1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-the-game-of-overbooking-flights/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-t...

rdtsc 10y ago
Yeah I saw that. That's brilliant. First thing is getting people thinking about getting money, so they are already primed, fantasizing about it. Then the hint about "Delta will pick the lowest bid first". Those interested already are willing to play but now have to think of others outbidding them so they lower the bid. And lastly and most importantly, it lets people who never want to participate (such as well, doctors who have to be there for their patients) not participate.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  I fly Delta. They've paid me over $1,000 in cash [1] to bump me off a $500 flight. I don't think United pays that much. Instead, they get aggressive. [1] American Express gift card
  - fastball 10y ago
    Actually, airlines in the US are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price or $1350 (whichever is lower) for a domestic delay >2hrs or an international delay >4hrs. If the bump delays you by <2hrs (generally unlikely), it's 2x ticket price or $650 (again, whichever is lower). You were probably entitled to $1350, so you really didn't do that great. That is also how much the United passenger is/was entitled to.
    - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      Blows me away that American regulators decided to cap compensation in the event of denied boarding [1]. [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2008/04/18/08-1145/oversales-and-denied-boarding-compensation https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2008/04/18/08-1145...
    - flukus 10y ago
      Are they mandated to pay cash? I've heard from a few threads on reddit that many will pay in vouchers, a dozen $100 vouchers that can't be used together.
      - soneil 10y ago
        Here's the fun part. The cash/cheque option is available if it was involuntary. But the option only has to be available, usually you have to ask for it. Not telling you that option exists is legit, telling you that option doesn't exist isn't. But if it was voluntary, the monetary option is not mandated. So when they ask if anyone wants to volunteer for a voucher, accepting that offer is volunteering, and writing yourself out of the cash option. (The airline can still offer it, but they no longer have to offer it).
        vijayr 10y ago
        Not telling you that option exists is legit How can this be ethical? The customer is doing a favor by giving up their seat, shouldn't they at least tell them what options are available? If I were an airline employee, I'd need to draw out a flowchart to remember all this.
    - 1024core 10y ago
      > are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price In the case of United, if by "pay" you mean give you a voucher (or N vouchers of value 1/N of the total, only 1 of which can be used at a time) for travel on their airline, to be used in 1 year, not to be combined with other offers, yada yada... No wonder no one wanted to take them up!
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    Do you have to pay taxes on that?

nebabyte 10y ago

> By contrast, Southwest—which has been taunting United over the Dr. Dao incident—has a slightly lower rate of overbooking than the other airlines I get the feeling that this is missing the point > Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Some weren't. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn't that United had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that apparently it's never happened before. > It hasn't happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway Did this person even watch the video? I seriously doubt regular instances of violent deplanings wouldn't be a point of pop culture by now if "against their will" always ended with a man being dragged bleeding off a plane

deelowe 10y ago
Seriously. Is the author trying to claim that getting knocked out and a bloody lip is par for the course or even, i don't know, has EVER happened in any of these 40,000 yearly instances?

mnarayan01 10y ago

> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Well at least we have numbers and pretty graphs.

nebabyte 10y ago
Where's the pretty graph for "against their will" versus "violently against their will"?

mc32 10y ago

After this incident what will likely happen is more legalese in the contract allowing for airline discretion when it comes to bumping people involuntarily. You'll have higher fares for guaranteed seats and lower fares (general cabin) will enjoy the prospect of being bumped with some pre-arranged compensation system. It'd be nice if all airlines, other than not overbooking, chose Delta's approach. Deplane option right as you check in.

caseysoftware 10y ago
It's not "deplane" if you're not on the plane yet. Also, it's come out that United's so-called "random" method was a sort based on frequent flier status and then (potentially) price paid for ticket. If that's really the case, they targeted their least valuable one-time customers first.. aka people who "next time" was months or years down the road. As someone with status, I get their reasoning but let's be honest and not call it "random."
- mc32 10y ago
  I am, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression most people who travel know that late bookings as well as cheap tickets are the first to get bumped if need be (besides the poor stadbys)
  - jpollock 10y ago
    As long as the contract is the same, the price I pay for the ticket should have no bearing on what happens in an overbooking situation.
    - mc32 10y ago
      I think companies tend to value their more profitable customers over their least profitable ones. If they could only book cheapskates like me, there would be no profitable airlines in the world. Not that I would mind the equivalence. On the other hand imagine the furore we'd see when a full-price customer got bumped.
- 10y ago

colmvp 10y ago

At the end of the day, this is less about stats and more to do with process. Overbooking happens. So do delays and shitty experiences with airlines. We get it. The difference was that United had many options at their disposal and chose one of the least humane methods in a civilized society. Furthermore, the leaked internal memo by the CEO shows a clear lack of empathy and I see a lot of similarities between what happened on the plane and the PR aftermath. In both cases, instead of choosing alternative choices that would come with some cost to the company(increasing the bounty to give up the seat, apologizing profusely for the incident) in exchange for rectifying a situation, they doubled down on bad choices (violent removal, written accusations against the passengers behaviour). Honestly, this would be non-story had they just upped the compensation to anyone interested in the plane. And on a side note, it's kind of sad how one of humans greatest technological achievements, the airplane, is associated with one of the least liked experiences in North America, namely going through airports, security, and dealing with airlines.

cmurf 10y ago
Airplanes are great. Airlines used to be great when there was competition. But we've ignored the merit of competition law, and allowed too much conglomeration in the name of profits. And the airlines are very profitable, but they are not competitive in particular on service and customer satisfaction. The last few mergers shouldn't have been permitted.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  I'd argue that it was competition that made the circumstances you see today - first class of today resembles standard class in the 70s for about the same relative price. Airlines increasingly wanted to grow the flying population, by lowering prices. More people have access to airplanes now, and so they have turned into what was traditionally the service and experience of a bus.
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    Nah. The experience in a bus: Nobody asks for your ID. You can pay cash. Nobody frisks you when boarding. Nobody irradiates you to watch nude images of you. You don't need to unpack your luggage half the time. You can stow your suitcase in half a minute, and can get it back equally fast. We would be so lucky if flying had the service and experience of a bus!

diiaann 10y ago

I got $500 from United for being bumped on a SFO -> BOS flight. My resulting flight was only 1.5 hours later and I got moved to #1 on the upgrade standby list. From what it sounded like, it was a computer system that decided the amount, not a human.

chrismcb 10y ago
United has a formula for deciding who to bump, based on ticket class, time of check-in, among others. It isn't supposed to be random
fastball 10y ago
USDOT mandates that they pay you 2x the ticket price (capped at $650) for a delay of less than two hours. So not sure what you paid for your ticket, but you may've been entitled to an extra $150.
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  If somebody gets bumped involuntarily after nobody accepted a lower compensation, they can get $650. If they offer $500 and one of the passengers takes it, he can't just rock up after the flight to ask for more money.
  - fastball 10y ago
    Right. I meant, from the OP's perspective, he did more for the airline than he really did for himself. Sure, he got some money. But he really helped the airline save money and continue to justify a (in my opinion) dishonest practice. Maybe we need to start a Airline Passenger's Union, so that we have some collective bargaining power when an airline wants to bump passengers, and instead of them convincing individuals to accept less than they deserve, we convince the airlines to pay more than mandated.

markdown 10y ago

Title should read "Which US Airline Kicks Off The Most Passengers?"

cmurf 10y ago

United has made threats of police force a thing before now, and it'd would seem that's effective due to the low instance of it going any farther than that http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united-low-priority-passenger-20170412-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

1024core 10y ago

This misconception that the flight was "overbooked" has to die. The flight was NOT OVERBOOKED. It was sold out, but definitely not overbooked. The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers. EDIT: Since some asked for a citation for the latter: 14 CFR 250.2a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a

rl3 10y ago
>And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers. Do you have a citation for this?
- jinfiesto 10y ago
  I also would like to see a citation for this. It's my understanding that deadheading crew members are considered must-rides and that this is an industry norm.
  - rl3 10y ago
    Likewise. A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding. [0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-denied-boarding-illegal/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-den... [1] https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_rvideos_just_filled_with_united_related/dg3xvja/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...
- sjg007 10y ago
  Yes, the news.
- 1024core 10y ago
  14 CFR 250.2a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a

chrismcb 10y ago

These were not people that were deplaned, they were people that were denied boarding. Two totally different things.

slowmotiony 10y ago

I can't wrap my head around how everyone is like "Yeah, overbooking happens, that's just the way it is". Why the hell is it legal? If I booked two clients on the same timeslot, collected cash from them in advance and then stood one up and offered him a fucking coupon, I'd have a court case opened against me the next day and I'd never find a client in the same city again. Why the hell do airlines still get away with it in the age of online payments?

megablast 10y ago
This wasn't overbooking, as was already said. And overbooking is legal because it is not illegal. And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight, and flight margins of <$100 profit per plane (during the worst times), not per passenger, you need to overbook.
- flukus 10y ago
  > And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight Why is that a problem? They've paid for a service and not used it.
  - plafl 10y ago
    It is nevertheless a wasted resource that could be used better. Indirectly it will cause all tickets fares to fall down which will benefit the people that actually flies. I'm not against overbooking but forcefully expelling a passenger is just another step in the direction of making taking an airplane just such a shitty experience. The correct, common sense, ethical and business savvy way to proceed would have been to start bidding until some passengers sold back their tickets. That would have been fair instead of some fixed compensation that doesn't take into account all kinds of inconveniences you will suffer because of losing your flight. I try to avoid taking airplanes nowadays which is quite sad considering I'm an aerospace engineer. My only positive thought is that airports are a nice contained experiment everybody is forced to watch of what happens to people when there is a power imbalance, even if you live in a democracy.

woliveirajr 10y ago

Overbooking and so on: some people might not know or remember, but on ancient times it was kind of 2 separated processes: buying the ticket was one thing, booking a specific flight was another. You could change your initial choice of flight (perhaps paying some fee, not the whole ticket again). Doing a no-show wouldn't make you loose your ticket (perhaps you would, again, pay some fee). Even the need to check-in is a consequence of that time. Without that, things would be straightforward: buy the ticket, board the plane, loose the ticket if you don't. With the ticket being a different thing from a "reserved seat in a specific flight", you end up with overbooking (selling more tickets than the flight can handle because usually someone will loose the flight, or will change it to another day). You end up with companies that don't want to lose the last seat in exchange of a small fee (it's better to sell another full ticket, no?). Perhaps prices would go up a bit. Perhaps people would be more pissed off when they loose the flight. I don't know. I just know that it began as a model that made sense at the time, and small changes added-up so that we are in this situation, now.

tunesmith 10y ago

It's worth pointing out that this article is just completely flat-out wrong. Kevin Drum is just completely screwing up here. The stats he references do not point to de-planing - a term he invents only for this article. All those involuntary denial of boardings he references are before passengers board the plane. Which makes a huge difference. The paper he links to (indirectly) makes zero mention of passengers being kicked off planes. They only make reference to involuntary denial of boarding, which happens before passengers get on the plane. I think there's only one other comment in this entire thread that makes this point. Just thinking it through a bit, you can see it makes no sense. If a plane is oversold, how the hell do they let the passengers board? You'd have two people trying to sit in the same seat.