Originally Posted by us2

Assuming that this account is more or less accurate, this really sounds like a scheme thought up by back offiice beancounters who don't deal with the operational realities of running an airline.

Overall, what I'd expect this to do in the aggregate is to lock people more into the flights onto which they were already booked. I'm not sure that's a good outcome when capacity is restricted as much as it is.

Any time you can get a person off a later flight and on to an earlier one, you're maximizing the capacity of the system for a given day. Given the lack of excess capacity in the system generally, that should always be a win-win for both the airline and the customer. Moving a customer to an earlier flight costs essentially nothing; when a seat on an early flight goes out empty, it's gone for the day. Ideally, you'd want the latest flights to be the emptiest -- it's your last chance to get people where they're going without an overnight delay -- and a backlog that then spills over into the next day.

Unless there's transparency in availability and your place in the standby list, paying $50 to standby is buying a pig in a poke, which essentially makes it unviable for infrequent leisure travelers and FOs. On a lot of routes, you'd achieve an equal result by going into the men's room, pulling out $50 and flushing it down the toilet, especially given the inability to move from a nonstop to a connection and vice versa. This is really the case on hub to hub flights, which tend to run full.

All in all, from what I can tell, this seems like one of those brilliant MBA generated ideas that sounds good in theory (where the operative objective is extracting as much cash from the customer as possible) but downright awful operationally. I can see this backfiring as the number of VDBs and IDBs increase, because what you've done is remove flexibility to move people around by trying to pass along as a cost to passengers something that is actually desirable from an operations perspective. A $50 fee is not insignificant, especially when, in some cases, it's money that is going to be thrown away.

Originally Posted by gooselee

Someone in the other thread also made the good point that right now, the availability of free SDC means that often pax are balancing out overbooked flights on their own, especially on elite-heavy routes, since they are taking seats that are currently unsold.

If SDC slows down/stops, and those seats remain unsold and unfilled, that increases the potential for the original flights being oversold and thus the potential for VDB/IDB.