johnsmith

A bit more info...
Apparently the flight the night before was cancelled. Not sure who was moved from sunday night to monday, but the 2 GS passengers didn't have seats and the 2 crew were in the same spot. When I got to the podium, they were offering $3000 (which seemed insane) looking for 4 volunteers.

They got 2 volunteers and were continuing to try to find 2 more as the flight boarded. At that point, a supervisor came over and upped the offer to $5000. Right after that, the gate agent realized they had 2 no-shows who had misconnected coming in from London (must have planned to overnight in EWR, but never showed for the flight), so they didn't actually need the last volunteers...regardless, they stuck to the $5k.

The gate agent didn't put a lot of effort into finding alternate flights--they were offering a 5pm flight (original flight was 7:30am), but I found options throughout the day (porter had multiple flights, Air Canada had options that United wasn't seeing and there were a ton of options from LGA)

I have no idea how they came up with the $3k--this felt like it should have been the normal $500/800 range. The $3k->$5k move was totally unnecessary--I don't know that someone was going to jump for $5k versus $3k--maybe that gets a family's attention over a holiday, but this was a business heavy flight and people kept saying no bc of meetings they had that day in toronto.

The mistake UA made here wasn't really investigating other flight options. Ultimately, one of the people who took the $5k refunded the United ticket and bought a new ticket on Porter around 9am...so a $5k VDB for a 1 hr delay. Bc they did it themselves, I think the net cost to the passenger was ~$300 ($600 porter one way ticket less a $300 refund from UA). Thats crazy!

diburning

Well, the vouchers can be less expensive for the airline than IDB comp. Someone might take the voucher and not use all of it, or not use it at all before it expired. IDB comp has to be paid in cash.

But wow, I'd jump on that. I'd put the $5K towards a flight up front on a TPAC and reap the rewards of the revenue ticket.

FlyngSvyr

I would have bum rushed the podium at 3K. Elbows would have been thrown

jjmoore

Yeeeap I would have done the same. I would have been there for $1000 mst likely. For $5000, I would rent a car and make the 12 hour drive.

DELee

Wonder if it was ua1flyer...$5K is serious moving of heaven and earth type of coinage.

David

johnsmith

funny--but it wasn't. It was an overseas GS and his spouse/companion. Both were sitting very quietly waiting for UA to pull people off the flight to accommodate them. I assume something happened the night before and they (and the crew that needed to get on the plane) were asked to wait patiently while United sorted things out. The gate crew was a little frazzled, but not that bad, until the freaked out and went from $3k to $5k.
honestly, I thought they were offering $300 not $3000 when I first walked over--everything was calm and kind of normal
They were slotting the extra crew into the jumpseat, then another off-duty pilot into 18A and then they had 4 left including the GS passengers.
The surprise was how indifferent the GAs were about identifying flight options--again, for $114, there were Air Canada (united codeshare) flights from LGA->YYZ at 10am/11am/noon, etc. Would it have been that hard to put a few passengers in a car to LGA for $500-750? the GAs never offered that. They just kept saying they could get people on the 5:30 pm flight and no one was interested
The guy who took it called Porter, booked the flight with them and grabbed the $5k voucher.
Just a weird process
I assume the number went so high because it was obvious most of the oversell was to get crew up to Toronto

phltraveler

Yesterday morning.
All coach 50 seater Embraer.
EWR -> YYZ
1 overbook for a 7:29AM departure.

$1200 VDB with re-accomodation at noon for 1:30PM arrival in YYZ and breakfast + lunch vouchers.

Didn't take it as I was supposed to have an important meeting in the afternoon which was cancelled...

pseudoswede

Sounds like EWR-YYZ needs to be upgauged to a slightly larger aircraft. Maybe UA should hold off retiring the 747s.

jsloan

Bzzt. The correct answer is, "sounds like I should be flying from EWR-YYZ more often."

phltraveler

The VDB from a flight on the same route in late June 2017 was $2000 on the plane itself for one overbook.

And yet they STILL fly EWR <---> YYZ almost entirely on 50 seater Embraers...

seanp7

They've shifted the afternoon/evening flights on some days to the E175 (YYZ-EWR), which I am very happy about.

I will keep an eye out Monday morning EWR-YYZ this week and next for more $1000+ VDB's !

RobOnLI

And I'm quite positive making a ton of money on the route. So why up-gauge the equipment to something with more seats where they have to fill those seats with cheap tickets?

-RM

stevehuff

Besides this thread, which is really helpful in terms of strategy, is there anywhere to find how likely a specific flight has been oversold in the past?

jjmoore

I don't think there is a website or any other means of gathering this type of information.

As for strategy, I don't think there really is one. There are days where it is more likely to see oversold flights but that's about it. Any inkling of a strategy that has come to my mind over the years has been shot down by experience.

Dr. Dao has dramatically decreased the number of oversold flights I have been on. This is the only correlation I have seen thus far.

BBSHOPSINGER

I have a flight coming up next Wednesday, and while reviewing the reservation, I was surprised to see that the seating chart was getting full (unusual for a Wednesday). I checked the actual availability, and here's what I get:

Available fare classes:F2 A2 JN2 C2 D2 Z2 ZN2 P1 PN0 R0 RN0 IN0 I0 Y0 YN0 B0 M0 E0 U0 H0 HN0 Q0 V0 W0 S0 T0 L0 K0 G0 N0 XN0 X0

I don't think I've ever see Y0 on a flight I've taken this long before the flight. It seems like a prime candidate for VDB. Does anyone know if United has started doing the proactive offers yet, and if so, how soon would they start them?