> Clearly there is some sort of profit motive for the airlines, but how can this be legal. Because no one has done anything about it. There are any number of

> Clearly there is some sort of profit motive for the airlines, but how can this be legal. Because no one has done anything about it. There are any number of scummy beahviors which are still legal. In this case, if (say) 1% of people never show up for flights, that's incentive for airlines to over-sell by 1%. Because the case where everyone does show up is the 1% of the 1%. i.e. it's more cost effective to fudge things and deal with problems later. The issue is that they have shitty procedures for dealing with that 1% of 1% situation. They still want to screw the customer out of every penny, where they could be telling themselves "We made our money on the other 99%, If we give this guy his money back and some more for inconvenience, we'll still come out ahead". The insistence on screwing the customer no matter what is deeply ingrained in corporate culture. Money and bad marketing be damned...