EIPremier

I'm a scientist...I have no problem with multivariate research or the use of empirical data. My beef is that the authors actually don't take full advantage of the data that is published by the DOT. Also the authors garner publicity by making largely unsubstantiated claims about the airline industry in general. As far as the data analysis is concerned, the problem is that by just taking the raw data from the DOT and plugging it into a formula, the ranges of values for the different criteria are incompatible with one another. Instead of looking at overall on-time percentage, they should look at the percentage of flights delayed due to airline-related factors, the percentage cancelled and the percentage left sitting on the tarmac for 3 hours or more. It's all public data, published every month, and inclusion of such factors would make the report more meaningful, as it would be objectively looking solely at instances of service failures (along with lost bags and IDBs).
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Regarding what the other poster said about denied boardings, I wonder if it's not so much the switch to $-off vouchers as it is just that flights are running fuller than they were last year, and it's very hard to reaccommodate pax. A lot of customers might accept "Ill give you $300 and put you on a flight in two hours" but not, "I'll give you $300 and put you on a flight tomorrow evening." I actually think $300/$400 vouchers AS offers are around industry standard, but apparently customers are not going for it. They probably need to offer greater compensation for overnight delays, and also, they could help prevent the problem by just not overselling the last flight of the day.

The interesting thing is that if you look at Air Travel Consumer Report, you can determine the total denied boarding rate (voluntary + involuntary denied boardings combined). Surprisingly, AS has a significantly lower rate of denied boardings compared the industry average (around 8 per 100,000 compared to 13 per 100,000). While AS did see its total oversales increase in 2009, it was not a dramatic increase. So, the problem is clearly not that AS is overbooking too much on a systemic basis. What increased drastically for AS was the percentage of total denied boardings that were involuntary. 25% of all denied boardings were involuntary!! In comparison, Air Tran had about 75% greater rate of total oversales than AS, but a drastically lower rate of IDBs. On Air Tran, only about 1.6% of denied boardings were involuntary. So, it would appear that AS does not so much need to reduce overbooking, but increase the incentives it is offering to customers.

Of course, many of the IDBs could be happening on certain routes and or times of the day/days of the week, so obviously a more thorough analysis is required. I wonder if certain leisure routes, like Vegas or Hawaii are most impacted, especially with the winter-time weight restrictions on the HA flights (tho it seemed like they normally chose the fuel stop option).