NB: This is a guest article by Mike Putman, founder at TravelTeamConsulting.com.
Why do airlines oversell their flights? To “maximize” revenue, of course.
You see, back in the good ol’ days of paper tickets and telephone reservations, you could make a reservation and have an “open” ticket.
Technically you can still do this, but it’s rarely done. During those times, the airlines didn’t necessarily associate the purchase of the ticket with the reservation.
While this flexibility was good for the traveler, it wreaked havoc on load factors for airlines, especially on heavy business traveler routes.
Some flights could experience as high as 20-30% no shows. So a practice was accepted of “overselling” the flight.
Simply put, if a plane had 100 seats, the airline might take 120 reservations. Over time they became really good at predictive modelling and knew how many extra reservations they could take without having groups of people enraged at the gate.
Ever wondered why you can’t get a boarding pass in advance, and yet when you get on the flight 25% of the seats are open? Don’t blame your travel agent, and don’t buy the old airline adage,
You once might have heard:
“We need to keep those seats open for handicaps and pregnant women…”
Although there is some truth in the airlines adage, the bigger reason they hold back seats is so they can play the oversell game and not have to wait until ten minutes before departure to begin releasing no-show seat assignments.
Current day
A study on denied boarding for confirmed passengers can be found in the most recent published findings from RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics for the US (Q1-2011).
Airlines routinely oversell flights, no shocking news here. They do so in light of the vast majority of tickets now being non-refundable (sans Southwest).
As non-refundable tickets became the norm, however, you would think the “no-show” factor would drop accordingly.
Well it has and this is what has precipitated your odds of not being allowed to board a plane, even though you have a ticket (vis a vis contract) probably being higher than ever.
Most have heard a gate agent say “anyone willing to give up their seat on this flight, will be confirmed on the next flight and given a voucher worth $xxx valid on a future fligh”, but what if no-one takes the deal?
Or what if the gate-agent or angry airline employee is having a bad day? The airlines have the right to not allow you to board. Alarmingly, there are airlines which have a much higher incident of this.
For example, you are almost ten times more likely to be denied boarding if you purchase a ticket on US Airways versus Delta.
Amazingly, Alaska Airlines and Air Tran reported zero denied boarding of confirmed passengers during the quarter in the stury, even when the pair had well over one million boards.
Therefore, your chances of being involuntarily bumped (aka denied boarding) even though you hold a confirmed ticket are:
- Mesa Airlines – 1 in 8425
- US Airways – 1 in 12,808
- American Eagle – 1 in 14,989
- American Airlines – 1 in 20,498
- Southwest – 1 in 33,733
- United Air Lines – 1 in 43,586
- ExpressJet – 1 in 59,531
- SkyWest Airlines – 1 in 82,814
- Hawaiian Airlines – 1 in 83,564
- Frontier Airlines – 1 in 90,885
- Continental – 1 in 133,951
- Atlantic Southeast – 1 in 212,364
- JetBlue Airways – 1 in 503,224
- Delta – 1 in 1,191,606
- AirTran Airways – no instances
- Alaska Airlines – no instances
Food for thought.
NB: This is a guest article by Mike Putman, founder at TravelTeamConsulting.com.
NB2: Airport line image via Shutterstock.
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> You once might have heard:
> “We need to keep those seats open for handicaps and pregnant women…”
Hardly an “old airline adage”. I have never, ever heard this used as a reason why someone would not be able to get a boarding pass in advance.
> the most recent published findings from RITA, Bureau of Transportation Statistics for the US (Q1-2011).
> reported zero denied boarding of confirmed passengers during the quarter in the stury
Is this a reprint of an older posting, modified with a current date on it? If the data you are referencing for this article is “during the quarter”, is it possible that you aren’t even using the most recent data available? Why else would the link to RITA place (Q1-2011) in parenthesis? That data is almost two years old at this point!
The sequence of air carriers with the highest instances of denied boarding are completely wrong. The most recent data that I could find comes from the report at: http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/reports/index.htm
For their most current quarter, April – June 2012, from best to worst the list looks like this:
RANK / AIRLINE / DENIED BOARDINGS / Involuntary DB’s per 10,000 psgrs
1 JETBLUE AIRWAYS 12 0.02
2 VIRGIN AMERICA 4 0.02
3 HAWAIIAN AIRLINES 11 0.05
4 DELTA AIR LINES 1,044 0.38
5 ALASKA AIRLINES 276 0.62
6 AMERICAN AIRLINES 1,349 0.68
7 US AIRWAYS 1,073 0.76
8 AIRTRAN AIRWAYS 601 1.00
9 FRONTIER AIRLINES 261 1.00
10 SOUTHWEST AIRLINES 3,090 1.05
11 AMERICAN EAGLE AIRLINES 528 1.10
12 EXPRESSJET AIRLINES 1,577 1.97
13 UNITED AIRLINES 4,450 2.11
14 SKYWEST AIRLINES 1,630 2.46
15 MESA AIRLINES 481 2.58
TOTALS 16,387 1.05
Reno,
Thanks for your comments. The data used was the most recent published by Bureau Of Transportation Statistic. The data was merely used to illustrate the point of the article, which is: With the technology available today, how can an industry be allowed to deny passengers boarding? What if the Detroit Tigers decided to sell an extra 100 tickets to tonight’s World Series game, and those 100 people showed up to be told “sorry we are oversold, we will get you in next year’s game”?
30 years ago, when we were making reservations by looking up schedules in these massive paper books, and calling airlines direct to make bookings on behalf of our clients this practice was understandable. There needed to be a revenue safety net for the airlines due to the inefficiencies. Today the airlines are requiring ticket numbers to be posted in PNR’s, most of which are non-refundable. If the airlines want to roll the dice and sell more seats than they have, they shouldn’t have the protection of being able to break the contract with the customer when they misjudge the no-show factor without reasonable compensation back to the consumer.