Overselling

[jack]

Your flight is oversold. Delta is seeking volunteers with flexible travel plans to exchange their seats for compensation ... If interested in volunteering see your gate agent at the airport.

Cool. I like the way this smooths over variations in demand by adding a little fungibility into the mix, and inconveniencing everyone the minimum amount.

However, do you know what would be a really convenient time to exchange your seat for compensation? BEFORE YOU SPEND FOUR HOURS GETTING TO THE DEPARTURE GATE! If everyone's checked in online, couldn't people be voluntarily or involuntarily bumped THEN? Rather than killing themselves rushing to the gate and then entering a lottery to see who makes their connecting flights and who has to sit in an airport for hours and doesn't?

Comments

[hatam_soferet]

Write and say so?

Unrelatedly, I understand there's Compensation involved, not that they tell you that up front of course.

[naath]

Or they could just *not oversell flights*. I mean, WTF!

But yeah, if I was going to be delayed 3 hours I'd rather have 3 hours at home than 3 hours in an airport, wouldn't everyone?

[pseudomonas]

Welll, if you know that 5% of people on average (with very small variance) don't turn up, you can sell 104% of tickets and be OK most of the time, and paying someone lots to make them happy when you oversell is better than running most flights 5% empty. Better ecologically as well as economically, though they likely don't care about that.