emcampbe

This. Who is gonna VDB for an X-hundered amount when they know they are willing to go to $9000+.

Or maybe supervisors don't show up to authorize. And now DLs IDB rate goes up instead.

kettle1

Many people will take $200 to $2000. DL asks when you check in how much you would take.

UA should have made a similar announcement before DL beat them to the punch. Again, it will be UA following DL's lead.

This could have been major damage control for UA when they need it. Instead, UA management in "the windy city" blew a great PR opportunity.

DL had the lowest IDB rates of any other major carrier, because they pay more. I posted this up-thread.

drewguy

Interpretation 1: United is cheap
Interpretation 2: Delta overbooks to a greater degree, and has to pay more as a result.

uastarflyer

the accountant in me would prefer less cash outflows overall. WN has a high IDB ratio yet they do better.

of course you need to set a sweet spot for VDB to avoid getting Dao'd. But simply having more IDB isn't a bad thing.

kettle1

"Compensation" does not mean it was cash. Most of the time it is vouchers good for one year. Many of these vouchers are never used. A voucher cost the airline very little. Cash would be another story.

STS-134

If you're waiting for it to go to $9000, I'm volunteering for $500. Capitalism is about greed and being greedy, I will take it for $500 because I'm afraid of someone else taking it at $600 before I can volunteer, in which case I get $0.

Toshbaf

^

And also making it expire in 2 years, not one year. I rarely fly UA. I wouldn't want a voucher good for a year. I will have to be dragged off and also get a broken nose and get some teeth knocked out. I would look like this before and this afterwards (no teeth).

I rarely add apps. I don't trust them. Back in the Palm Pilot days, I had a bunch of apps, like the Continental flight schedule but no more.

No, that is a sneaky ticket price increase. How about if you are IDB, you can have them go down the line and add your own money to the pot.

GrayAnderson

At least anecdotally, this is also because Delta starts the bidding higher. One thing to think about is the ratio of VDBs to IDBs:
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/12/these...assengers.html

DL's ratio is 32:1, competing with VX for the highest ratio. United's is 9:1. Frontier is the worst (at about 3:1).

I'm wondering...perhaps rather than going after individual cases there should be some sort of fine if an airline's VDB:IDB ratio (or even just if their IDB rate) is too high? The idea that, for example, Expressjet and Skywest oversell by that much (nearly one in every 500 pax who show up being denied their seat) is boggling to the mind.

desi

"If Delta paid $9,950 to every person it bumped involuntarily last year, that would total $12 million. Delta earned nearly $4.4 billion."

This announcement alone is worth more than 12 million in PR to tragetted audience than general vague commercial airlines run on expensive TV ad slots.

Colin

add a option on united.com at final payment to reduce the fare by $5 if you consent in advance to be chosen for a required IVDB. passenger still gets the standard IVDB payout of course.

make the amount low enough so that only 5% or so of passengers would be interested in the savings. once enough volunteers secured for a flight, no longer offer the option for that light on new United.com bookings.

char777

...though I would argue that as revenue management continues to improve, especially at UA with Orion, forecasts will get better at predicting overbookings, and therefore VDBs and IDBs will become far less common. Even looking at DOT data, all denied bookings industry-wide are at some of their lowest levels in a quarter of a century, even with the higher load factors taken into consideration.

The furor over this IDB situation is a highly emotional one to say the least, and this IDB story, like every other complaint anyone has about any airline they don't like, is mostly based on anecdotal experience. UA is not significantly worse at handling VDBs and IDBs than much of its competitors, and B6's commitment to never overbooking doesn't mean that they don't have some pretty crappy IDB rates as of late.

The issue here really has nothing to do with overbooking. The issue has to do with calling in LEOs who used excessive force on a passenger, and then UA's piss poor initial response to the entire thing. Had UA simply said "this video is horrifying and we're going to do an investigation to figure out what happened," even if nobody at UA actually believed that, the story probably would have died the next day.

GrayAnderson

I had wondered about that. B6's issues are related to downgauging flights by around 50 seats. As the article notes, an overbook of 3-5 seats might easily be handled. You might well be able to fish out ten seats with some aggressive offers. Trying to fish out more than 10-15% of a flight (probably 20-25% in the case of B6), however, is likely to be tricky even in the best of cases even with absurd voucher offers.

I think you might still retain IDB (requiring better VDB offers in line with the length of delay as well as adjusting compensation for the IDB accordingly), but I do agree with resurrecting some form of Rule 240. We're back to the "24 hour delay" problem with this and I don't think it's unreasonable to require the option of "other carrier" transportation.

I'll just throw out an example: Let's say that for some reason this was an ORD-EWR flight instead, but everything else remains the same (with an adjustment to the length of the flight, of course). At that point, "other carrier" transport on Amtrak would be faster than waiting out the delay (and you'd be more than able to make the Lake Shore Limited, too...that doesn't depart until 2130). The same general fact pattern would apply to a slew of other destinations (Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Buffalo, Memphis, and New Orleans). If you're willing to just bite the bullet on Greyhound the list grows.

I think restricting restrictions on vouchers would be another thing to consider. Require that VDB vouchers be "same as cash" with the airline (I think I mentioned this elsewhere), including the ability to use more than one on a reservation and/or partially use them on a reservation. I'd also strip away the requirement that the person issued the voucher be on the reservation, though I would be willing to allow them to require that if they weren't on said reservation then they need to, at some point, be physically present and present ID to redeem for someone else or to transfer ownership (e.g. I'd need to head over to my local airport within some timeframe to confirm it). I do get the fraud concern there, but if the voucher were essentially an unrestricted negotiable instrument (aside from only being valid with the airline) then UA would probably have had takers at $800 since I think someone on here would happily have bought that unrestricted $800 voucher for $600.

Loose Cannon

Perhaps I should clarify. No IDB whatsoever. once the person had his Boarding Pass scanned and is therefore considered "boarded" whether actually in his seat, on the plane or queuing in the jetway.

I do think that the current caps on IDB compensation should become floors instead with no cap. And those "floors" should be adjusted upward annually for inflation.

Beckles

There are plenty of people who will bid less. Last time I was bumped I think I bid $200, in that case it was an early evening flight and I knew that if they asked I was only going to take it if they got me home the same night, so at most it was a 2 hour delay and the difference between getting home at 10 PM and midnight is pretty minimal. In fact in that situation I did get bumped and they put me on flights that were scheduled and in fact did get in a few minutes before my originally scheduled flights. If you're doing an auction you're going to get people to accept much less than $9,950 depending on how long they'll be delayed for.

Regardless, the other part of getting people to take VDB is reaccomodation and the airlines need to be more creative. In the case of Dr. Dao's incident UA should not have been offering $800 and accommodation on a flight the next day, instead they should have been offering $800 and a six hour van ride that got passengers home that night.

STS-134

There are already floors. The airline is free to offer goodwill money in excess of the required IDB amount by law (the floor). But the problem is that if the required IDB amount is less than what the airline needs to offer to get enough VDBs, then management beancounters will tell GAs to just IDB people because it's cheaper (neglecting any PR disasters that occur as a result of this, of course).