201–210 of 335 posts
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Do you understand how expensive it is to take a taxi that far? Or the fact that taxi/rental car companies usually don't like you going over state lines?
Care to elaborate? I've never had any trouble going over country lines, let alone state lines, in a rental car.
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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 once received the $500 voucher, and as an infrequent traveller, it was completely useless. The voucher went unused and expired. I wish they had offered me cash. Now, I am a frequent traveller and mostly travel on business. Now again, the vouchers are useless to me. I think the airlines should offer real cash instead of vouchers. More people would be ready to take those instead of vouchers.
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…
>how economically important it is to overbook. I still don't believe this claim. A 727 seats 129, a 787 seats 290, and a 747 seats 366. That means it only makes flights slightly less expensive. I only travel a few times a year and I'd rather pay 2% more than get bumped off my flight. Why do we allow airlines to overbook but not movie theaters or other industries? This seems like an artificial advantage we've given th…
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…
Yea, I agree the problem is not auctioning seats high enough. But the proximate issue is that United didn't offer cash, but $800 in United Fun Bux that are worthless for most people. The vouchers they were offering were only valid at dates United decided. The vouchers expired after a year. And they are offered in coupons for which you can only use one coupon per flight, and the excess value is lost. Practically all n…
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The issue I have with that is then these middle-men buyers would step in like they do for NFL and concert tickets, buying up all/most supply almost immediately when it becomes available for any reasonably popular flight. Then they charge double the price, and there's not much one could do other than pay double or not fly.
Airlines would set higher prices in the first place.
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One possibility is that the regional flights are only marginally profitable for United, and very slim margin for the regional carrier (Republic Airline/United Express) so they limit voucher amounts for bumped passengers. 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…
They could have just used a rental car or a taxi. Airline crews don't have to travel by air. The amount of inflexibility displayed by United is breathtaking.
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Up to 10k in vouchers. I don't even know how someone with a non-travel job would use that many coupons in a year.
A lot more easily when you realize what a Y-class economy fare costs (Boston to Hawaii next week? $2700+)... Vouchers are typically only valid for full fare unrestricted economy fares or better, not V-class discount fares (display details when you browse your next flight).
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That isn't how game theory works. Colluding with 100 people becomes harder the reward for defection grows higher.
And so does the incentive to try shenanigans that break the simple model of the game.
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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…
> 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. 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 w…
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To offer a counterpoint, Southwest also offers the worst boarding procedure, unless travelling alone or with kids. My wife and I were going on vacation and it was impossible to get seats together as we were pretty far back in the assigned line positions and by the time we got on the plane, there were no two vacant seats next to each other. After landing we discovered that checking in at the right time might get us fu…
counter point: i prefer southwest because there's little incentive to fight for position. They give you a complete ordering, so you can wait until the last minute to line up. (also as others mentioned, it's faster which is great too) If you care so much about an aisle seat, get early check in, it's $15.