Originally Posted by
Sunfish
I am travelling to Asia and Europe on separate holidays in the next few months. I am travelling business class and I have a web of hotels, tours, trains and internal flights booked.
I have some protection via travel insurance, but. my reaction to the practice of overbooking is unprintable.
It would be far better in my opinion to stop overbooking and instead enforce financial penalties (i.e. no refund) for no shows, require people to take out travel insurance and let the insurance companies deal with the matter.
I note in passing that the ACCC is already investigating airlines for the practice of charging allegedly ridiculous fees for changing flights, etc. that bear no relationship to the cost (if any) of the change.
To put that another way, inflexible fares sometimes allow an airline to profit by charging twice for the same seat on the same flight. Overbooking is unnecessary..
Most tickets sold these days are non-refundable & it's up to the individual airline, whether it will allow no shows on nonref tix to go subload on a later flight.
There's an urban myth about an Australian family flying from CTS to NRT to connect with a JQ flight home. The CTS/NRT leg was late. When they finally got to the JQ gate, their seats had been given away & when the family asked could they get on the next flight, the next day, the JQ staff said sure. Just pay the equivalent of AUD$7500.
If airlines didn't charge a decent fee to change flights, some pax would do it all the time. As most Australians want to do this by phone to an Australian call centre, who has to pay Australian wages/conditions, the costs would be high.
Overbooking is absolutely necessary for the survival of many airlines, especially now the OZ real estate market has completely collapsed esp in SYD/MEL & the recession we had to have is upon us + we now have WW3 likely in Korea, which will do wonders for airline load factors. Here there are some very cheap fares via S Korea at present.