Why Airlines Sell More Seats Than They Have

[Samiam]

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqWksuyry5w[/media]

Perhaps a bit informative in the wake of the United Airlines fiasco

[Noob©]

tl;dw
they overbook because they have sophisticated data on amount of no-shows so they can maximize profit (or minimize losses) per flight in order to stay competitive in the low-cost flight market. 9 out of 10k passengers get denied flight on average but the numbers are improving since 1990. When they do need to shove someone off the plane, valuable customers (recurring, members, early-checkins) get deprioritized.

[based on my understanding on the video]
[DEL]They NEED to overbook because consumers want cheap(est) flights. In order to achieve that, this practice is required for that price to happen. They are not doing this to deliberately fuck customers and get all the monies.[/DEL]
idk this [url=http://fusion.net/airlines-can-treat-you-like-garbage-because-they-are-an-1794192270]site[/url] says otherwise: major American airlines are working together so there are no competition, only oligopoly

[Sharo]

I don't think it should be legal to go about it that way. There's good explanations for what's going on in this video, but what I'm getting from this is still that although they've reduced the amount of fraudulent tickets they sell, and they still sell fraudulent tickets today, because not doing so wouldn't be as lucrative. They may have great systems for predicting how many will miss their flights, but clearly it doesn't always work, which it absolutely needs to do 100.0% of the time since anything else is straight up fraud. And that's not to mention that in the case we've seen, the man was [I]already given a seat[/I], how do you fuck that up? Shouldn't it have been sorted out at the gate, at least?

[Elspin]

[QUOTE=Trebgarta;52090053]If the tickets were "fradulent" overselling wouldn't be a profitable thing due to lawsuits.[/QUOTE]

Well it's definitely not fraudulent within current laws but there are rules they have to follow if they do it, that I don't think were mentioned properly in the video. Explanation at the [url=http://business.financialpost.com/entrepreneur/bumped-from-a-flight-heres-what-youre-entitled-to]the financial post[/url], but basically they might legally [b]have[/b] to cut you a cheque for 4x the cost of your flight + taxes.