131–140 of 335 posts
Southwest Airlines has the best website, best checked luggage policy, best change policy, and now no overbooking. The big four domestic airlines all treat coach passengers like cattle, but Southwest is the least predatory. Edit: Also, consider that Southwest is very profitable despite the fact that they don't have first class or business class sections on their aircraft. Yes, passengers pay different fares. But as fa…
The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. I've seen a number of overbooked southwest flights and people can't line up fast enough for a $300 flight credit + next available flight. I can't imagine it ever going over $1k. IMHO if any airline should continue overbooking it's SWA. No first class, no assigned seats. Most of the flights are short range with multiple flig…
> The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. This. Oh so very much this. United could have avoided this whole debacle simply by not imposing price controls on the market for seats when it became a buyer rather than a seller.
The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. I've seen a number of overbooked southwest flights and people can't line up fast enough for a $300 flight credit + next available flight. I can't imagine it ever going over $1k. IMHO if any airline should continue overbooking it's SWA. No first class, no assigned seats. Most of the flights are short range with multiple flig…
For an Embraer 170 aircraft (70 seats) the operating cost of the flight is about $2500-$3000 for the Chicago to Louisville flight. A supplementary flight with the 4 crew and any re-booked passengers would have cost the airline about $5,000 if they flew out-and-back as a non-scheduled flight.
SWA 737s cost around $4,000/Hr to fly, but a non-scheduled (Out and back) flight on a shorter route would still cost less than $12,000 in operating expenses.
The $1000+ flight credits for bumped passengers add up fast, but supplementary flights are relatively rare for airlines, other than for cancellations due to maintenance issues. CEOs like Oscar Munoz need to make supplementary flights easier to authorize, and the negative PR would be significantly reduced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but the problem is that most tickets are now, in effect, standby, but not labeled as such. Hence why the parent suggested making the status (and the option to upgrade) clearer and more readily available.
On Delta the Basic Economy (E) basically are standby since you can't select your seat and are only assigned one at check in (or at gate? can't remember). It's not even that much cheaper than regular main cabin.
The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. I've seen a number of overbooked southwest flights and people can't line up fast enough for a $300 flight credit + next available flight. I can't imagine it ever going over $1k. IMHO if any airline should continue overbooking it's SWA. No first class, no assigned seats. Most of the flights are short range with multiple flig…
However, thinking about it more, I think there's a problem with that that's hidden by the nature of the United debacle.
In that situation, the passengers had tickets, and they company was trying to seat their own staff. That is, the potential buyer was the airline, and the sellers were the passengers. So in that scenario, auctioning makes sense, because you can literally flip the buyer and seller roles.
However, in a typical overbooking situation, there are more passengers than seats, so it's unclear who the buyer and sellers are, because none of the "sellers" actually "own" anything definitive. If the tickets are all infinitely valuable to each passenger, no one can get on the plane, and there's a sort of stalemate. Then I suppose there would be a cost to each passenger, and an incentive to accept a price, and it wouldn't be infinite anymore. But in general, the cost dynamics seem weird to me. But then again, I'm not an expert in this.
At some level, overbooking seems indistinguishable from fraud--which can also be profitable for its practitioners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. This. Oh so very much this. United could have avoided this whole debacle simply by not imposing price controls on the market for seats when it became a buyer rather than a seller.
Could they have averted disaster with money? It's astounding that there were no volunteers when they offered USD 800 for a seat, 800 dollars is a nice sum. Every single passenger on that airplane thought there was a catch involved, they were getting again 800 dollars in airline vouchers, which everyone knows have big gotchas attached. The airline has a trust problem, which won't improve anytime soon.
I have a question for the HN crowd: what would happen if airlines sold their seats at a fixed price and let customers resell them? For the sake of the discussion let's assume that all seats are in the same class (ie: economy) - there are no business / first class seats. So the idea would be: 1. All seats are sold at the same price, no matter how early or how late you buy. The price covers all the costs associated wit…
The way I understand it, if airlines were to offer fixed-price tickets with no class distinction, then there wouldn't be almost any flights - i.e. there's no point at which, for a typical flight, number of tickets bought * fixed price >= costs of fueling a jet and paying the crew.
This response feels knee jerk. It's been demonstrated in countless other threads (1) and articles (2) how economically important it is to overbook. Overbooking is central to airline profitability and their ability to provide flexibility - like partial refunds, or SW's "open tickets" policy on business select. As a consumer I appreciate these things and find them incredibly useful. United's response of "We'll push the…
Overbooking is key for maximizing producer surplus. Whether or not that is economically advantageous to the economy as a whole is a different and more complex question. But the notion that a company maximizing it's surplus is _always_ beneficial to consumers is tricky but more likely false within the confines of my limited understanding of contemporary economic theory.
United increasing the maximum bump fee completely solves the problem. Short of the apocalypse, you're going to find plenty of takers on any flight for $10k, even if it's a multiple day delay. The people who take the payoff are better off -- if they weren't, they wouldn't have taken the voluntary deal to fly later. Then the airline just needs to gather some statistics about how high the auctions go, and optimize the overbook rate to maximize their revenue. Everyone then is better off. In fact, on a lot of flights, you can probably find multiple people to bump with just a token payment -- they'd rather stay another day.
The other great thing about dynamic overbooking like this is that you never have to have a sold out flight, some of them are just really expensive. Someone who really needs to be on a plane walks up and plunks down $5000 or something, and the airline finds the least disrupted passenger, and pays him a few hundred. The bumped guy is happy to have the money, the last minute guy is happy to be on the plane, and the airline is happy to make $4700 extra.
This works even better with a name-your-price bump question on checkin for flights that are oversold. Even if it's nonbinding, the airline now knows that it has willing passengers to bump and can keep selling tickets.
The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. I've seen a number of overbooked southwest flights and people can't line up fast enough for a $300 flight credit + next available flight. I can't imagine it ever going over $1k. IMHO if any airline should continue overbooking it's SWA. No first class, no assigned seats. Most of the flights are short range with multiple flig…
> The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. This. Oh so very much this. United could have avoided this whole debacle simply by not imposing price controls on the market for seats when it became a buyer rather than a seller.
The problem isn't overbooking. The problem is not auctioning the seats higher when overbooked. I've seen a number of overbooked southwest flights and people can't line up fast enough for a $300 flight credit + next available flight. I can't imagine it ever going over $1k. IMHO if any airline should continue overbooking it's SWA. No first class, no assigned seats. Most of the flights are short range with multiple flig…
So... my first reaction to your comment was "why don't they just turn this into an actual auction, with no price limits? This seems like such a good solution that I feel like I must be missing something." However, thinking about it more, I think there's a problem with that that's hidden by the nature of the United debacle. In that situation, the passengers had tickets, and they company was trying to seat their own st…
I'm not quite sure I'm following. When the airline overbooks then tries to pay off passengers to accept a different flight the buyer is always the airline.
They're buying your seat back from you to satisfy their contract with someone else. I can't fathom a situation where every seat is infinitely valuable - out of several hundred people surely at least one person will accept a million dollars for example.
Overbooking can look like fraud, but if the airline offers an uncapped ever-increasing payout for a seat then the risk profile increases significantly for them and they'll do it to a lesser degree.