Originally Posted by
SATCOS WHIPPING BOY
As a loyal customer, would you not prefer to be told that the flight you wanted was full and you had that chance to make alternate arrangements or would you prefer to be sold a ticket which, when you get to the airport, you are told it will not be honoured . .
You're looking at this in concrete terms rather than in probabilistic terms. That's not the choice I'm faced with. It's more like this:
As a loyal customer, would you rather pay x% less for your ticket, in return for facing a y% chance that you'll be denied a seat due to overbooking plus the airline's inability to find volunteers? In 2016, looking at American, United, and Delta, your chance of being involuntarily denied boarding was somewhere around one in 20,000 flight segments flown.
By how much would you need to discount my ticket to make me happy with a 1 in 20,000 chance of being denied boarding? Certainly 25 cents to a buck would do it for me.