Originally Posted by jjl468

I've seen a lot of reports of flights being oversold and this is likely a very large contributor to that. Airlines may be seeing that more people are not actually taking their flights and may therefore be more generous in how many people they allow to overbook a flight. Most travelers right now are also extremely time-sensitive, which exacerbates things and requires GAs to offer extremely large sums of money to get enough volunteers.

The worst part is that the fare pricing won't notably change per-person, so the people who do such bookings won't be the one most impacted by this. Instead, this cost will be split across all travelers to allow for this behavior, leading to yet another case of the tragedy of the commons