Plane Conversations

The Mysteries of the Oversold Flight

“Ladies and gentlemen, our flight is very full today; so, we ask that all passengers on (your flight number) check in at the podium.”  I’m going to tell you something you already suspect – “our flight is very full” is code for “your flight is oversold by a few seats – but not too many.”  When they actually say that your flight is oversold, it is oversold by a significant number and the gate agent is panicking.

I hated oversold flights.  I hated them worse than weather delays, mechanical cancellations, lost baggage and bad hair days.  If I saw that my fourth flight of the day was oversold, I dreaded it through the first three.  Casual travelers don’t understand oversold flights and business travelers don’t care – they’re not their problem.  Oversales are hideous to explain, especially the one where I had to deny a man boarding because another man had bought a seat for his cello, and I’m not kidding.  Weather delays and mechanical cancellations happen from time to time.  Nobody likes them, but nobody thinks that they are intentional, either.  Oversold flights are a different kettle of fish altogether.  Someone intended to sell too many tickets for that flight.  I think it’s the intent that sends passengers torquing through the ceiling.

Why would they do that?  Why sell the same seat to two people?  Well, here’s the thing: they do it because passengers buy tickets on flights, then they don’t show up.  They don’t cancel their reservations, they just don’t show.  There may have a valid reason, but, whatever the reason, the passenger is holding a ticket for a seat that they aren’t going to use.  They can use that ticket for another seat on another flight; so, even paying a penalty to change the ticket, the passenger has, in reality, tied up two seats and paid for only one.  That causes waste for the airline.

Airlines have departments called Yield Management (or something similar) that studies routes to find boarding trends, looking at the number of passengers who fail to show up for a flight, or no-show.  They then figure that “no-show factor” into their calculations to make that route profitable.  You might think that the no-show factor wouldn’t be high enough to even bother with; however, there are routes that have nearly a 50% no-show factor.  That’s right.  Half of the passengers don’t cancel their reservations – they just don’t show up.  If the airline didn’t count on that and sell more tickets than they have seats for, the aircraft would go out half empty.  From a business standpoint, the airlines just cannot let that happen. So, they oversell flights.

Until air mass-transit systems find a better way to handle these wasteful situations, they are going to continue to provide poor customer service and they will continue to hemorrhage money.  Meanwhile, savvy travelers are finding a way around the time-wasting, blood pressure-peaking, nickel and diming experience that airline travel has become.  They are chartering their own aircraft, single or multi engine, jet or turboprop.  They are traveling on their own schedules to the airport closest to their destinations and they are always assured of having a seat.