Back in the late 80's, Continental started service from HNL to MNL (Honolulu/Manila). The first week of the service we ended up with over 100 customers arriving from SFO without reservations. It seems that a dishonest travel agent sold over 100 tickets using only one reservation. All of these people ended up in the boarding area awaiting seat assignments. We collected their tickets and boarding envelopes asking them to wait until we could seat them. We knew we weren't going to be able to seat them but we couldn't tell them that until the flight left.

The boarding area was large (we flew a 747) and no one was the wiser until they saw the plane pushing from the gate area. A small riot started when everyone realized that they weren't on the flight and the police had to be called. The dishonest travel agent was put out of business, and we managed to get all of the stranded customers on other flights within the next few days but that didn't stop the people from calling the TV stations to complain about us and they also called the Phillipine Consulate in protest.

No one broken anything, thanks to the police but they did spend the night, in front of our ticket counter, chanting that we were unfair.