Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
It's mildly depressing that here we are, nearly 40 years after the Airline Deregulation Act was passed, and we're seeing posts (presumably from professionals working in the industry) who don't seem to have a clue about the rationale for the practice of overbooking.
How hard is "it keeps fares lower" (or the corollary, "it keeps profits higher") to understand ?
The facts are these:
- Pretty much every airline all over the world overbooks.
- Overbooking, because it increases revenue yield per flight, reduces average ticket prices so long as airlines face at least some competition from each other.
- Overbooking is just one of many reasons why passengers may have to give up their "confirmed" seat. And none of these reasons for why passengers may have to give up their seat disappears just because a passenger may have already passed through the boarding wicket and sat down on the plane.
- The Internet is replete with stories from pax on every major airline about how they were unjustifiably (in their own minds, anyway) denied boarding or carriage on the flight they had booked.
- What constitutes egregious mistreatment of pax is very broad. While what happened to this particular pax on this UA flight likely qualifies, some believe that every pax on loco carriers such as (fill in the name of your favourite bottom-feeding cattle-car operator) are egregiously mistreated. And there are an awful lot of them.