3 ms·

Why do US airlines overbook flights? Is it the same sort of thinking?

chrisseaton 8y ago
No that metaphor doesn't work. US colleges' approach to admissions is more like selling aeroplane tickets but not asking people where they want to go, then be surprised when they all get to the airport and try to cram on the one plane going to the same place. In other places you buy a ticket for a destination. Yeah some flights might be a bit overcrowded in some cases, but it's not as bad as not knowing how many people want to go to each destination at all.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  They aren’t surprised. Rather, they simply can’t make all planes go to the same place. That happens over time, but then you have recessions where that plane becomes extremely unpopular, which messes up that growth.
- dsiegel2275 8y ago
  There is certainly an aspect of overbooking present in university admittance/enrollment: Universities regularly "admit" more students than they can actually allow to "enroll". If a university can physically support a freshman class of, say, 1000 students, they will "admit" a number higher than that, say 1300, knowing that only a percentage of the students that they admit will actually end up enrolling (because very simply some of them choose to enroll at a another university that they were also accepted into). Here at the university I work at they refer to this "admittance/enrollment" ratio as "yield" or "yield rate". The yield is tracked from year to year and the number of acceptance letters sent out is based on this historical data. Sometimes, though, the University is surprised (like this past year here) and gets a much higher yield rate and ends up with more students than dorm rooms...
  - AlphaWeaver 8y ago
    At my university, in this situation, there _were_ more students than dorm rooms, and we have a freshman live-on requirement, so the university actually had to pay to rent out several entire floors of commercial apartments near campus.
alex_young 8y ago
Overbooking increases the likelihood of full flights which increases the efficiency of the system and reduces costs. It's hard to see a problem with that.
- zbentley 8y ago
  > It's hard to see a problem with that. I think it's a value judgement. Is a lowered price of the majority of instances of a thing (flying or taking a class, in these examples) a worthwhile trade for the reward being a probability rather than a guarantee? Is the severity of the minority case (getting bumped) worth the trade? What actual probabilities for happy vs. sad path are acceptable to you? Those are subjective questions with no inherently correct answers.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Also there's some worth in having spare capacity. When you're constantly overbooking and suddenly there's a spike in demand, you're SOL and there's no good way out of this.

No that metaphor doesn't work. US colleges' approach to admissions is more like selling aeroplane tickets but not asking people where they want to go, then be surprised when they all get to the airport and try to cram on the one plane going to the same place. In other places you buy a ticket for a destination. Yeah some flights might be a bit overcrowded in some cases, but it's not as bad as not knowing how many people want to go to each destination at all.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
They aren’t surprised. Rather, they simply can’t make all planes go to the same place. That happens over time, but then you have recessions where that plane becomes extremely unpopular, which messes up that growth.
dsiegel2275 8y ago
There is certainly an aspect of overbooking present in university admittance/enrollment: Universities regularly "admit" more students than they can actually allow to "enroll". If a university can physically support a freshman class of, say, 1000 students, they will "admit" a number higher than that, say 1300, knowing that only a percentage of the students that they admit will actually end up enrolling (because very simply some of them choose to enroll at a another university that they were also accepted into). Here at the university I work at they refer to this "admittance/enrollment" ratio as "yield" or "yield rate". The yield is tracked from year to year and the number of acceptance letters sent out is based on this historical data. Sometimes, though, the University is surprised (like this past year here) and gets a much higher yield rate and ends up with more students than dorm rooms...
- AlphaWeaver 8y ago
  At my university, in this situation, there _were_ more students than dorm rooms, and we have a freshman live-on requirement, so the university actually had to pay to rent out several entire floors of commercial apartments near campus.

alex_young 8y ago

Overbooking increases the likelihood of full flights which increases the efficiency of the system and reduces costs. It's hard to see a problem with that.

zbentley 8y ago
> It's hard to see a problem with that. I think it's a value judgement. Is a lowered price of the majority of instances of a thing (flying or taking a class, in these examples) a worthwhile trade for the reward being a probability rather than a guarantee? Is the severity of the minority case (getting bumped) worth the trade? What actual probabilities for happy vs. sad path are acceptable to you? Those are subjective questions with no inherently correct answers.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Also there's some worth in having spare capacity. When you're constantly overbooking and suddenly there's a spike in demand, you're SOL and there's no good way out of this.