What a Chutzpah El Al- SHAME ON YOU!!
 

Cousins of mine show up at JFK 9:15 PM Saturday night for LY 11:50 PM flight. Sabbath ended 8:00 roughly so earliest you could make it from Brooklyn is in the area of 9 PM. So they wait online, finally their turn to check in and alas "we don't have seats for you". Albeit they booked their tickets 10 months prior, probably earlier than the majority of the pax on the flight.

No explanation, no offer to rebook, nada. What about the fact they have hotel reservations for the whole family for Passover...oh right El Al doesn't care. I have no problem with an airline overbooking by 45 to ensure they go out full and don't lose revenue, but what about a plan? They had months to work on re-route options with other carriers.

The good news is Continental just got 2 more 6-10X yr TLV pax.

Happy Passover to all!

Avi

Now you know why I haven't flown el al in 6 years, and don't plan to anytime soon.

They fly NYC-TLV 6-10x a year, booked 10 months in advance and checked in almost 3 hours early, and were denied boarding without any recourse? Wow.

Unless they had Matmid status would the check-in agent even be able to see how many points you have or flights you have taken? Also, flights taken is very different than flights booked, when flying many people will hold multiple reservations and either let some expire without paying or have full fare refundable tickets in case the trip no longer becomes necessary.

All that aside, this is still ridiculous. I do have one more idea though. For whatever reason El Al may have thought the the pax may now present some sort of security risk. I have had this happen to a friend of mine (he is extremely religious, and looks it, used to make the same number of flights, many of them in B, and had Matmid status.) He had one thing going against him, his last name was Arab, family of sephardic origin. One day he was flying out of TLV and when he went to check in, he was told that there was a problem and his reservation has been deleted. After having some personal friends work some official and unofficial channels he was able to fly standby. He went from front of B to back of Y (and this is when they still had the smoking section.)

Really I don't think security has anything to do in the present case... It is a very "usual" scenario of overbooking...but it's unbelievable that El Al employees in JFK didn't deploy their best efforts to find an alternative for these passengers to get to TLV as quickly as possible.

Is this really the best way to build a great "image"...? But that's the problem: as long as El Al will not understand that its passengers are CUSTOMERS who are not obliged to fly El Al, and as long as El Al will not treat them accordingly, which means with respect instead of crude chutzpa, it won't work...and El Al will remain in trouble.

Did they make it to Israel for Pesach in the end? What did they do?

Did they get some compensation?
I am sure they got compensation if they came to airport on time.
I have a flight on sunday the 15th, it seems the whole day the flights are overbooked.
These are the good occasions to check in online.

they did not make it. only compensation was a free ticket... they lost money on car and hotel res

A free ticket?
Thats not bad, was that only given because they missed the Seder or do they always offer free ticket when they bump you off.

I wonder if you can convince them to give 1400 matmid points instead!

Was this free ticket in addition to a re-route / refund?

Something does not make sense. At first you said they did not get anything and now you say they got a free ticket.

Airlines generally do not compensate you for your ground arrangements not made through them as well as connecting flights that are not booked though them. They are responsible to get you from point A to point B as soon as they can after you get bumped off your flight and offer some compensation if that takes longer than 4 hours.

If LY offered them a free ticket that's way more generous than what one will usually get when being bumped for overbooking.