http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/200...ingsthatgobump
Thu Jul 19, 12:20 AM ET
A lot has changed in the airline industry in the past 30 years, but one thing hasn't: The amount you get if you're involuntarily bumped from your reserved seat.
Now there's an effort to raise those penalties, and not a moment too soon. With planes flying full and bad weather disrupting schedules, what the industry calls DBs (denied boardings) have spiked this year to the highest levels in at least a decade.
Of course, it'd be nice if federal regulators and airlines would do away with overbooking altogether, but that's not about to happen. There's grudging agreement that overbooking is an ugly necessity: Airlines compensate for passengers who skip flights and reuse their tickets later by estimating how many no-shows they'll have on a given flight and overbooking by that amount. Their quite reasonable goal is to fill as many seats as possible and try to eke out a profit.
Usually, airlines guess right. Bumped passengers are a tiny fraction of all air travelers: about 13 of every 10,000. Subtract those who voluntarily give up their seats when airlines offer travel vouchers or other inducements, and involuntary bumpees make up fewer than 1.5 of every 10,000. That sounds tiny, but a lot of people fly: 55,828 were involuntarily bumped last year. And if you happened to be one of those 55,828, it was a huge problem.
What to do? Since 1978, airlines have generally been required to pay involuntarily bumped passengers up to $400 if they couldn't get on another flight scheduled to arrive within two hours of the original plane.
Now the U.S. Department of Transportation is thinking about extending bumping rules to planes with as few as 30 seats (the cutoff is now 60 seats), and raising compensation to as much as $1,248 to reflect inflation since 1978. Both are sound ideas.
Expanding the rules would acknowledge the reality that smaller planes, especially regional jets, make up a large and growing segment of air travel. And while $1,248 might sound like a lot of money, that's the point. Travelers deserve compensation for the enormous inconvenience of losing a seat they've been promised and having to pay for things like food, rental cars and hotels that cost more than they did in 1978.
Tougher penalties would also give carriers a more powerful incentive to bump as rarely as possible. After the current rules went into effect, bumping rates declined for years. Money talks, and sometimes that's what it takes to get airlines to listen.
Denied boarding
Involuntary bumpings per 10,000 passengers for the first quarter of 2007:
* JetBlue — 0.04
* AirTran — 0.21
* United — 0.40
* American — 1.06
* Northwest — 1.25
* Southwest — 1.25
* US Airways — 1.68
* Continental — 1.93
* Delta — 3.47
Source: Transportation Department