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Doesn't buying plane tickets in advance let airlines plan capacity better?
by Eridrus 10y ago
Doesn't buying plane tickets in advance let airlines plan capacity better?
- JadeNB 10y ago> Doesn't buying plane tickets in advance let airlines plan capacity better? Thereby avoiding situations like an overbooking in response to which they call on the police to remove an already boarded passenger!
- gumby 10y agoThey can do some capacity modulation through pricing, sure, but their historical DBs have a large enough 'n' (American Airlines SAABRE was the first big database application and drove database design) that they can predict pretty well. Which is why the bumped-due-to-overbooking is pretty low. BTW I think it's appalling that overbooking is allowed in this age of nonrefundable tickets. You've paid for the seat; whether you sit in it is your business. In the old days of regulation most tickets were fully reusable, and overbooking harks back to that time.
- hinkley 10y agoFor many airlines, you can re-schedule your non-refundable ticket for another day for a fraction of the cost of the original ticket. You still have to fly on that airline at some point to recoup any of the value of the ticket, but it can be done.
- JadeNB 10y agoI can't reply to my sibling post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14301909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14301909 , where this comment probably belongs, but I hoped I might be allowed to clarify that my badly worded response was not meant to be meaningless snark. What I meant to say in response to > Doesn't buying plane tickets in advance let airlines plan capacity better? was that whatever airlines are doing to plan their capacity doesn't seem to work very well. In support of this vague claim I adduced a news incident, very very snarkily (for which I apologise), but honestly in a spirit of discourse rather than simply of attention grabbing.