An Inside Look at Bumped Flights
June 1, 2007. For those who will fly to their next business meeting, wedding or luxury vacation rental, the New York Times offered a fascinating and frustrating look into the “art� of bumping passengers.
Passengers are bumped when flights are overbooked and the gate agents need some people to voluntarily or involuntarily stay behind. The compensation for such an inconvenience usually involves free airline tickets that can be used later, a hotel stay and money for meals. For someone with a flexible schedule, being bumped can become a small windfall; some passengers report they frequently volunteer. For others, it can be a nightmare, as the increasing amount of overbooked flights can delay them for days, in some extreme cases.
Depending on the airline, only 9.5 to 16 people per 10,000 passengers were voluntarily or involuntarily bumped in 2006, according to the New York Times article. That was a minor increase from last year, however. The article probes in depth the way airlines purposely overbook flights to prevent them from losing money on empty seats. Compensating a bumped passenger costs less than leaving a seat empty, the airlines say.
The airlines employ statisticians who constantly analyze data and decide by how much to overbook a flight. Their data tells them, for example, that people from the Midwest will make their flight, while people leaving Las Vegas might be a no-show.
Unfortunately, the number-crunchers sometimes overestimate the no-shows, and too many people show up for an overbooked flight. And that is why overbooked flights are on the rise.
