Air Canada agents reveal overselling practices

No. The number of pax that show up is somewhat random, the number of seats on the plane is somewhat random (weight and balance, broken oxygen mask or seatbelt, higher priority pax such as crew that need to be ferried to a flight that could not otherwise go, etc.)

To always plan such that the highest possible number of pax is smaller or equal to the lowest possible number of seats available is wasteful.

Why don't people understand that an airline operates under different constraints than a bus company or a train operator? In a plane, you can't just have a few more people sit in the aisle.

Now, like any stochastic problem, you assign weights to both suboptimal outcomes (empty seats, bumped pax), and optimise, which leads to modest overbooking. Now, most of the time everyone gets along (and more people than without modest overbooking), and sometimes some people are denied boarding. Some people need to be at a certain place at a certain time, and some people don't care if they're a day or two late. So you ask for volunteers and compensate.

It's not only perfectly rational, but also perfectly moral.

Why don't you get upset that people ever have to wait for surgery? Why don't we double the number of doctors and hospitals, so that always anytime someone needs surgery they can immediately get it? Well, because it's prohibitively expensive, and it's much more efficient to keep the facilities utilised as fully as possible, and shift around the demand (patients) a bit. Is that a deplorable strategy based on pure greed? No, it's a sensible optimisation to utilise scarce resources as well as we can.

Talking of greed, do you know how to make a small fortune in aviation? Easy, start with a big fortune.

Of course, regulation could make bumping pax even more expensive and thus change the calculation. That would probably lead to higher ticket prices and more (but emptier) planes in the air. Is that preferable to the current "pathetic, deplorable strategy based on pure greed"?

EDIT to add: This is assuming decent communication, and decent compensation for bumped pax (as is the case in Europe). I'm not really familiar with the situation in Northern America, if they just bump pax without compensation and/or lie to them, that's clearly not good, either.

No more than they do now. The only difference between what I'm proposing and what is currently done is that the people who get bumped if too many people show up "volunteer" ahead of time.

I've never experienced the process of asking passengers who wants to stay. Only finding out at the gate at the last moment. Also seen it happened to many other travelers while I passed through - finding out their ticket won't get you through the gate - shocked, frustrated, pissed off. You seem to be an airline apologist, maybe an insider? Or you just never faced the situation described?

Way too many wrong/incorrect statements in your post to cover all of those, and tons of whataboutism. But at least some:

> Why don't people understand that an airline operates under different constraints than a bus company or a train operator?

Why oh why... should I care? Its a public transport offering, nothing more or special. It certainly doesn't give them some extra credit so they can act amorally to maximize profits.

> To always plan such that the highest possible number of pax is smaller or equal to the lowest possible number of seats available is wasteful.

By your logic, we should all be transferred like a cattle, since it would be way more efficient, and who cares about treating customers with basic dignity when you can optimize, right?

Bottom line - my opinion is airlines should pay extra to people they on purpose deny boarding due to overbooking compared to other causes, only because their wonderful analytical methods and systems screwed up again. In all my overbooking experiences, the compensation was too small to even cover additional expenses I had to pay to cover for the mess created by airlines. And how do you compensate stress, frustration, missed opportunities, reduced time for vacation etc on top of that? Also the process of retrieval compensation is often as complicated as possible, ie that LOT took quite a few calls to their support to send me a 'secret' link you simply can't find on their website, and it took more than 2 months to get money after filling it. It was even an EU regulation breach, but do you think anybody at airline cared? At least some other airlines were more direct.

How do you apologize the fact they let you roll through check in, but send you home/to hotel only at the gate? It is really a wonderful experience, apparently you might benefit from that humiliation a bit and see things from customer's perspective.

Good point. I'll keep that in mind the next time!

For example, British Airways heavily oversells their LHR-USA flights in business, premium economy, and economy. This often means that business class passengers get upgrades to F, premium economy fills business and if necessary, they can bring economy passengers forward.

This strategy works for them because they have a ton of very large planes on some routes that can go through spurts of heavy loads.