Originally Posted by Air Houston

My experience in talking with gate agents at CO outstations is that they are pretty good at predicting no shows. On several occasions the agent has said something along the lines of "this flight averages 2 no-shows, so if we have that today you will clear the stand by list" and I was indeed the last passenger to clear stand by after being second on the list. I have never received that kind of info at a hub, but at the smaller airports where one agent works the same flights every day it's more common.

One time I was on a red eye flight that averaged 8 no-shows (per the agent) but almost the whole plane was a high school band going on a big trip. And there were zero no-shows and they were overbooked by eight. There were quite a few nervous parents in the gate area as the CO agent asked for volunteers from the remaining passengers. As i recall they ended up giving $800 and first class the next day to get enough volunteers. So clearly no system of overbooking is fool proof.