What's more interesting than the numbers is the linked article[1] about how Delta avoids problems by asking passengers on overbooked flights how much they'd want in order to give up their seat at check in time. By doing it early and without the other passengers around it eliminates possible bidding-up at the gate and lets them have a list of low cost bumps ready as soon as it's needed.
Yeah I saw that. That's brilliant. First thing is getting people thinking about getting money, so they are already primed, fantasizing about it. Then the hint about "Delta will pick the lowest bid first". Those interested already are willing to play but now have to think of others outbidding them so they lower the bid. And lastly and most importantly, it lets people who never want to participate (such as well, doctors who have to be there for their patients) not participate.
Actually, airlines in the US are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price or $1350 (whichever is lower) for a domestic delay >2hrs or an international delay >4hrs.
If the bump delays you by <2hrs (generally unlikely), it's 2x ticket price or $650 (again, whichever is lower).
You were probably entitled to $1350, so you really didn't do that great.
That is also how much the United passenger is/was entitled to.
Are they mandated to pay cash? I've heard from a few threads on reddit that many will pay in vouchers, a dozen $100 vouchers that can't be used together.
Here's the fun part. The cash/cheque option is available if it was involuntary. But the option only has to be available, usually you have to ask for it. Not telling you that option exists is legit, telling you that option doesn't exist isn't.
But if it was voluntary, the monetary option is not mandated. So when they ask if anyone wants to volunteer for a voucher, accepting that offer is volunteering, and writing yourself out of the cash option. (The airline can still offer it, but they no longer have to offer it).
> are mandated by USDOT to pay you 4x the ticket price
In the case of United, if by "pay" you mean give you a voucher (or N vouchers of value 1/N of the total, only 1 of which can be used at a time) for travel on their airline, to be used in 1 year, not to be combined with other offers, yada yada... No wonder no one wanted to take them up!
Incorrect. By law, at least, cash is mandated. Not a voucher.
Relevant text:
>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above... The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment.... The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment...
Full text:
>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above, on the day and at the place the involuntary denied boarding occurs. If the airline arranges alternate transportation for the passenger's convenience that departs before the payment can be made, the payment shall be sent to the passenger within 24 hours. The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment. In that event, the carrier must disclose all material restrictions on the use of the free or discounted transportation before the passenger decides whether to accept the transportation in lieu of a cash or check payment. The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment or refuse all compensation and bring private legal action.
Are we searching for the utility minimizing solution? There are times when I wouldn't choose $1,350 to have my flight delayed by 30 minutes, and times when I'd happily take $100 to have a 2 hour wait shifted to before my flight rather than after my flight.
Auctions maximize utility for the sellers and buyers of the inconvenience. A fixed price means that there will be a surplus or shortage of willing passengers. That means there will be some situations where an airline pays more than it should and people are disappointed they weren't chosen, and some situations where there are irate passengers that inevitably result in violence.
JumpCrisscross did well, by definition, because JumpCrisscross is happy with the transaction. A lot of people would be very unhappy with $1350 for a delay depending on the day. Considering that $1000 was a positive outcome, I fail to see how $13.50 (1% chance of being chosen for $1350 award) is preferable.
> By contrast, Southwest—which has been taunting United over the Dr. Dao incident—has a slightly lower rate of overbooking than the other airlines
I get the feeling that this is missing the point
> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Some weren't. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn't that United had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that apparently it's never happened before.
> It hasn't happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway
Did this person even watch the video? I seriously doubt regular instances of violent deplanings wouldn't be a point of pop culture by now if "against their will" always ended with a man being dragged bleeding off a plane
Seriously. Is the author trying to claim that getting knocked out and a bloody lip is par for the course or even, i don't know, has EVER happened in any of these 40,000 yearly instances?
> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen.
After this incident what will likely happen is more legalese in the contract allowing for airline discretion when it comes to bumping people involuntarily. You'll have higher fares for guaranteed seats and lower fares (general cabin) will enjoy the prospect of being bumped with some pre-arranged compensation system.
It'd be nice if all airlines, other than not overbooking, chose Delta's approach. Deplane option right as you check in.
It's not "deplane" if you're not on the plane yet.
Also, it's come out that United's so-called "random" method was a sort based on frequent flier status and then (potentially) price paid for ticket. If that's really the case, they targeted their least valuable one-time customers first.. aka people who "next time" was months or years down the road.
As someone with status, I get their reasoning but let's be honest and not call it "random."
I am, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression most people who travel know that late bookings as well as cheap tickets are the first to get bumped if need be (besides the poor stadbys)
I think companies tend to value their more profitable customers over their least profitable ones. If they could only book cheapskates like me, there would be no profitable airlines in the world.
Not that I would mind the equivalence. On the other hand imagine the furore we'd see when a full-price customer got bumped.
Sadly, I think both airline and media who repeated the random selection narrative, don't know what the word means, rather than being dishonest about it. Random is what a computer does, i.e. some metric they do not understand and cannot predict is to them random. They only understand it in terms of some really imperfect examples or metaphors that totally cheat them out of what randomness really is.
So now if you want to talk about crypto with them, it's instantly so problematic you'd just have to back the train way up. It's like the Feynman magnets video. Pointless without the necessary basic understanding.
The priority of all other confirmed passengers may be determined based on a passenger’s fare class, itinerary, status of frequent flyer program membership, and the time in which the passenger presents him/herself for check-in without advanced seat assignment.
That's pretty close to what we have at the moment. What went wrong with 'the doctor' wasn't the compensation structure, or even that it was involuntary. It was simply a failure in dispute resolution.
(and, imho, a complete failure that this had to happen in their seats. It's difficult to take 'no' for an answer when everyone's seated and watching, because they'll just learn that 'no' works and answer the same way. Denying someone boarding and evicting them once they're seated are essentially the same legally, they're not 'boarded' until the doors are closed. But logistically, entirely different)
At the end of the day, this is less about stats and more to do with process. Overbooking happens. So do delays and shitty experiences with airlines. We get it.
The difference was that United had many options at their disposal and chose one of the least humane methods in a civilized society.
Furthermore, the leaked internal memo by the CEO shows a clear lack of empathy and I see a lot of similarities between what happened on the plane and the PR aftermath. In both cases, instead of choosing alternative choices that would come with some cost to the company(increasing the bounty to give up the seat, apologizing profusely for the incident) in exchange for rectifying a situation, they doubled down on bad choices (violent removal, written accusations against the passengers behaviour).
Honestly, this would be non-story had they just upped the compensation to anyone interested in the plane.
And on a side note, it's kind of sad how one of humans greatest technological achievements, the airplane, is associated with one of the least liked experiences in North America, namely going through airports, security, and dealing with airlines.
Airplanes are great. Airlines used to be great when there was competition. But we've ignored the merit of competition law, and allowed too much conglomeration in the name of profits. And the airlines are very profitable, but they are not competitive in particular on service and customer satisfaction.
The last few mergers shouldn't have been permitted.
I'd argue that it was competition that made the circumstances you see today - first class of today resembles standard class in the 70s for about the same relative price.
Airlines increasingly wanted to grow the flying population, by lowering prices. More people have access to airplanes now, and so they have turned into what was traditionally the service and experience of a bus.
Nah. The experience in a bus: Nobody asks for your ID. You can pay cash. Nobody frisks you when boarding. Nobody irradiates you to watch nude images of you. You don't need to unpack your luggage half the time. You can stow your suitcase in half a minute, and can get it back equally fast.
We would be so lucky if flying had the service and experience of a bus!
Yes, the mergers can only make the customer experience worse.
I don't live in the US but I remember when flying last year there were few sectors in which there was only one airline operating (if memory serves right, there was just United between Las Vegas and SF). So, even if I'm disgusted by the way United treats its passengers, I have no choice.
The little that I've understood of airlines and their economics, I think the best way out is to nationalise all the airlines and let them be run as a public utility. Introducing capitalistic principles has either kicked off a race-to-the-bottom on prices, miles and treating customers like cattle.
Actually, I would say that the "difference" is that United boarded the entire plane, the tried to get four people to give up their seats. Overbooking happens; but, in my experience, it's dealt with after checking in and before boarding. They make an announcement and ask for volunteers before anyone has boarded the flight.
In this case, United boarded the flight without considering the flight crew they needed to put on the flight -- putting them in the situation of removing four passengers.
I got $500 from United for being bumped on a SFO -> BOS flight. My resulting flight was only 1.5 hours later and I got moved to #1 on the upgrade standby list. From what it sounded like, it was a computer system that decided the amount, not a human.
USDOT mandates that they pay you 2x the ticket price (capped at $650) for a delay of less than two hours. So not sure what you paid for your ticket, but you may've been entitled to an extra $150.
Right. I meant, from the OP's perspective, he did more for the airline than he really did for himself. Sure, he got some money. But he really helped the airline save money and continue to justify a (in my opinion) dishonest practice.
Maybe we need to start a Airline Passenger's Union, so that we have some collective bargaining power when an airline wants to bump passengers, and instead of them convincing individuals to accept less than they deserve, we convince the airlines to pay more than mandated.
United has made threats of police force a thing before now, and it'd would seem that's effective due to the low instance of it going any farther than that
This misconception that the flight was "overbooked" has to die. The flight was NOT OVERBOOKED. It was sold out, but definitely not overbooked.
The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers.
I also would like to see a citation for this. It's my understanding that deadheading crew members are considered must-rides and that this is an industry norm.
A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding.
IANAL, but that specifically deals with denial of boarding, which isn't technically applicable to the incident in question. Moreover, it only applies in context of oversold flights, and the flight was not oversold.
Assuming it does apply, there's no outright prohibition on denial of boarding to confirmed reserved space passengers. It merely says that the airline must ensure that the smallest practicable number of confirmed reserve space passengers are involuntarily denied boarding.
The deadheading crew was likely using positive-space employee passes that had a higher seating priority than any ticketed passengers on the flight. According to the definition of "confirmed reserved space"[0], those employees may very well qualify as such. I could find no specific statement suggesting that employees are not considered passengers for the purposes of the definition, let alone deadheading employees that are not involved in the operation of that particular flight.
There's even a section on boarding priority that's pretty vague and largely boils down to having a reasonable policy in place to deal with situations where insufficient volunteers come forward to take advantage of compensation.[1]
> United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said Tuesday that all 70 seats on United Express Flight 3411 were filled, but the plane was not overbooked as the airline previously reported.
Thank you. I was wondering all this time why would they swap a passenger already sitting in place with another seemingly "similar" passenger (from their point of view). I have not read anything mentioning another United crew.
I can't wrap my head around how everyone is like "Yeah, overbooking happens, that's just the way it is". Why the hell is it legal? If I booked two clients on the same timeslot, collected cash from them in advance and then stood one up and offered him a fucking coupon, I'd have a court case opened against me the next day and I'd never find a client in the same city again. Why the hell do airlines still get away with it in the age of online payments?
And overbooking is legal because it is not illegal.
And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight, and flight margins of <$100 profit per plane (during the worst times), not per passenger, you need to overbook.
It is nevertheless a wasted resource that could be used better. Indirectly it will cause all tickets fares to fall down which will benefit the people that actually flies. I'm not against overbooking but forcefully expelling a passenger is just another step in the direction of making taking an airplane just such a shitty experience. The correct, common sense, ethical and business savvy way to proceed would have been to start bidding until some passengers sold back their tickets. That would have been fair instead of some fixed compensation that doesn't take into account all kinds of inconveniences you will suffer because of losing your flight. I try to avoid taking airplanes nowadays which is quite sad considering I'm an aerospace engineer. My only positive thought is that airports are a nice contained experiment everybody is forced to watch of what happens to people when there is a power imbalance, even if you live in a democracy.
The following may not apply in other places as it does in Australia, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Airlines don't care about unused seats, if they did we'd have last minute rates like we do for hotels. Hotels know it's better to have someone pay $20 a night than to have their capacity go unused at $50 so they'll drop the price for booking a day or two in advance.
Airlines do the opposite, they charge more for booking late.
It's just a form of price discrimination. Early bookers are usually price-sensitive individuals. They're prepared to shop around, or even forgo the trip if it's too expensive. Late bookers are mostly corporate customers or price-insensitive individuals.
So airlines make the most revenue by setting prices low early on, and higher toward the flight date. They certainly care about unused seats, but the revenue from expensive last-minute bookings normally outweighs the revenue they would get from filling all remaining seats at a discounted price.
They do their best to minimize unused seats by getting the prices right early on, and adjusting based on observed demand. But at a certain point, it makes sense to raise prices even if it's highly likely that there will be unused seats.
Right, I "just need" to overbook because some of my clients decide not to show up for things PAID IN ADVANCE. This is exactly the mentality I mentioned in my original post.
I think it comes from the type of people that think law and morality are the same, that breaking the law is immoral and that you are acting morally as long as you are within the letter of the law.
Overbooking and so on: some people might not know or remember, but on ancient times it was kind of 2 separated processes: buying the ticket was one thing, booking a specific flight was another. You could change your initial choice of flight (perhaps paying some fee, not the whole ticket again). Doing a no-show wouldn't make you loose your ticket (perhaps you would, again, pay some fee). Even the need to check-in is a consequence of that time.
Without that, things would be straightforward: buy the ticket, board the plane, loose the ticket if you don't.
With the ticket being a different thing from a "reserved seat in a specific flight", you end up with overbooking (selling more tickets than the flight can handle because usually someone will loose the flight, or will change it to another day). You end up with companies that don't want to lose the last seat in exchange of a small fee (it's better to sell another full ticket, no?).
Perhaps prices would go up a bit. Perhaps people would be more pissed off when they loose the flight. I don't know.
I just know that it began as a model that made sense at the time, and small changes added-up so that we are in this situation, now.
It's worth pointing out that this article is just completely flat-out wrong. Kevin Drum is just completely screwing up here.
The stats he references do not point to de-planing - a term he invents only for this article.
All those involuntary denial of boardings he references are before passengers board the plane. Which makes a huge difference.
The paper he links to (indirectly) makes zero mention of passengers being kicked off planes. They only make reference to involuntary denial of boarding, which happens before passengers get on the plane.
I think there's only one other comment in this entire thread that makes this point.
Just thinking it through a bit, you can see it makes no sense. If a plane is oversold, how the hell do they let the passengers board? You'd have two people trying to sit in the same seat.
65 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] thread[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-t...
[1] American Express gift card
If the bump delays you by <2hrs (generally unlikely), it's 2x ticket price or $650 (again, whichever is lower).
You were probably entitled to $1350, so you really didn't do that great.
That is also how much the United passenger is/was entitled to.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2008/04/18/08-1145...
But if it was voluntary, the monetary option is not mandated. So when they ask if anyone wants to volunteer for a voucher, accepting that offer is volunteering, and writing yourself out of the cash option. (The airline can still offer it, but they no longer have to offer it).
How can this be ethical? The customer is doing a favor by giving up their seat, shouldn't they at least tell them what options are available?
If I were an airline employee, I'd need to draw out a flowchart to remember all this.
In the case of United, if by "pay" you mean give you a voucher (or N vouchers of value 1/N of the total, only 1 of which can be used at a time) for travel on their airline, to be used in 1 year, not to be combined with other offers, yada yada... No wonder no one wanted to take them up!
Relevant text:
>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above... The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment.... The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment...
Full text:
>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above, on the day and at the place the involuntary denied boarding occurs. If the airline arranges alternate transportation for the passenger's convenience that departs before the payment can be made, the payment shall be sent to the passenger within 24 hours. The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment. In that event, the carrier must disclose all material restrictions on the use of the free or discounted transportation before the passenger decides whether to accept the transportation in lieu of a cash or check payment. The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment or refuse all compensation and bring private legal action.
Auctions maximize utility for the sellers and buyers of the inconvenience. A fixed price means that there will be a surplus or shortage of willing passengers. That means there will be some situations where an airline pays more than it should and people are disappointed they weren't chosen, and some situations where there are irate passengers that inevitably result in violence.
JumpCrisscross did well, by definition, because JumpCrisscross is happy with the transaction. A lot of people would be very unhappy with $1350 for a delay depending on the day. Considering that $1000 was a positive outcome, I fail to see how $13.50 (1% chance of being chosen for $1350 award) is preferable.
I get the feeling that this is missing the point
> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Some weren't. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn't that United had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that apparently it's never happened before.
> It hasn't happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway
Did this person even watch the video? I seriously doubt regular instances of violent deplanings wouldn't be a point of pop culture by now if "against their will" always ended with a man being dragged bleeding off a plane
Well at least we have numbers and pretty graphs.
It'd be nice if all airlines, other than not overbooking, chose Delta's approach. Deplane option right as you check in.
Also, it's come out that United's so-called "random" method was a sort based on frequent flier status and then (potentially) price paid for ticket. If that's really the case, they targeted their least valuable one-time customers first.. aka people who "next time" was months or years down the road.
As someone with status, I get their reasoning but let's be honest and not call it "random."
Not that I would mind the equivalence. On the other hand imagine the furore we'd see when a full-price customer got bumped.
So now if you want to talk about crypto with them, it's instantly so problematic you'd just have to back the train way up. It's like the Feynman magnets video. Pointless without the necessary basic understanding.
The priority of all other confirmed passengers may be determined based on a passenger’s fare class, itinerary, status of frequent flyer program membership, and the time in which the passenger presents him/herself for check-in without advanced seat assignment.
(and, imho, a complete failure that this had to happen in their seats. It's difficult to take 'no' for an answer when everyone's seated and watching, because they'll just learn that 'no' works and answer the same way. Denying someone boarding and evicting them once they're seated are essentially the same legally, they're not 'boarded' until the doors are closed. But logistically, entirely different)
The difference was that United had many options at their disposal and chose one of the least humane methods in a civilized society.
Furthermore, the leaked internal memo by the CEO shows a clear lack of empathy and I see a lot of similarities between what happened on the plane and the PR aftermath. In both cases, instead of choosing alternative choices that would come with some cost to the company(increasing the bounty to give up the seat, apologizing profusely for the incident) in exchange for rectifying a situation, they doubled down on bad choices (violent removal, written accusations against the passengers behaviour).
Honestly, this would be non-story had they just upped the compensation to anyone interested in the plane.
And on a side note, it's kind of sad how one of humans greatest technological achievements, the airplane, is associated with one of the least liked experiences in North America, namely going through airports, security, and dealing with airlines.
The last few mergers shouldn't have been permitted.
Airlines increasingly wanted to grow the flying population, by lowering prices. More people have access to airplanes now, and so they have turned into what was traditionally the service and experience of a bus.
We would be so lucky if flying had the service and experience of a bus!
If you upgrade enough to private then you can get the flying experience of the 50s: Small Planes, no security, walk on the tarmac.
It's like paying more puts you further back in time.
I don't live in the US but I remember when flying last year there were few sectors in which there was only one airline operating (if memory serves right, there was just United between Las Vegas and SF). So, even if I'm disgusted by the way United treats its passengers, I have no choice.
The little that I've understood of airlines and their economics, I think the best way out is to nationalise all the airlines and let them be run as a public utility. Introducing capitalistic principles has either kicked off a race-to-the-bottom on prices, miles and treating customers like cattle.
In this case, United boarded the flight without considering the flight crew they needed to put on the flight -- putting them in the situation of removing four passengers.
If they offer $500 and one of the passengers takes it, he can't just rock up after the flight to ask for more money.
Maybe we need to start a Airline Passenger's Union, so that we have some collective bargaining power when an airline wants to bump passengers, and instead of them convincing individuals to accept less than they deserve, we convince the airlines to pay more than mandated.
http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united...
The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers.
EDIT: Since some asked for a citation for the latter: 14 CFR 250.2a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a
Do you have a citation for this?
A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding.
[0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-den...
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...
Assuming it does apply, there's no outright prohibition on denial of boarding to confirmed reserved space passengers. It merely says that the airline must ensure that the smallest practicable number of confirmed reserve space passengers are involuntarily denied boarding.
The deadheading crew was likely using positive-space employee passes that had a higher seating priority than any ticketed passengers on the flight. According to the definition of "confirmed reserved space"[0], those employees may very well qualify as such. I could find no specific statement suggesting that employees are not considered passengers for the purposes of the definition, let alone deadheading employees that are not involved in the operation of that particular flight.
There's even a section on boarding priority that's pretty vague and largely boils down to having a reasonable policy in place to deal with situations where insufficient volunteers come forward to take advantage of compensation.[1]
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/index.php?width=840&...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.3
> United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said Tuesday that all 70 seats on United Express Flight 3411 were filled, but the plane was not overbooked as the airline previously reported.
And overbooking is legal because it is not illegal.
And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight, and flight margins of <$100 profit per plane (during the worst times), not per passenger, you need to overbook.
Why is that a problem? They've paid for a service and not used it.
Airlines don't care about unused seats, if they did we'd have last minute rates like we do for hotels. Hotels know it's better to have someone pay $20 a night than to have their capacity go unused at $50 so they'll drop the price for booking a day or two in advance.
Airlines do the opposite, they charge more for booking late.
So airlines make the most revenue by setting prices low early on, and higher toward the flight date. They certainly care about unused seats, but the revenue from expensive last-minute bookings normally outweighs the revenue they would get from filling all remaining seats at a discounted price.
They do their best to minimize unused seats by getting the prices right early on, and adjusting based on observed demand. But at a certain point, it makes sense to raise prices even if it's highly likely that there will be unused seats.
Without that, things would be straightforward: buy the ticket, board the plane, loose the ticket if you don't.
With the ticket being a different thing from a "reserved seat in a specific flight", you end up with overbooking (selling more tickets than the flight can handle because usually someone will loose the flight, or will change it to another day). You end up with companies that don't want to lose the last seat in exchange of a small fee (it's better to sell another full ticket, no?).
Perhaps prices would go up a bit. Perhaps people would be more pissed off when they loose the flight. I don't know.
I just know that it began as a model that made sense at the time, and small changes added-up so that we are in this situation, now.
The stats he references do not point to de-planing - a term he invents only for this article.
All those involuntary denial of boardings he references are before passengers board the plane. Which makes a huge difference.
The paper he links to (indirectly) makes zero mention of passengers being kicked off planes. They only make reference to involuntary denial of boarding, which happens before passengers get on the plane.
I think there's only one other comment in this entire thread that makes this point.
Just thinking it through a bit, you can see it makes no sense. If a plane is oversold, how the hell do they let the passengers board? You'd have two people trying to sit in the same seat.