Incorrect. IDB's are the ones the government cares about. If an airline is able to coax you away from your flight with your consent, the regulators don't give a damn...they take the data, but it will never impact regulation. A volunteer is someone who got an acceptable vvalue proposition. The IDB's are the ones that get weighted heavily by regulators as they pooint to a failure where a passenger is not given either what he/she bought, or what they were willing to accept. I will tell you now, most carriers planners don't see VDBs as an issue. It allows them to give out $$ that must be used for a future purchase in exchange for real cash money into the revenue stream by overbooking. An IDB is real cash out of pocket issued by the airline. It (the IDB process) has many regulations that go along with it that VDBs don't have.

Now the operations folk aren't the same bean counters as the revenue folk...they see both as an issue as it both VDBs as well as IDBs put a stress on the airines operational resources (delays=loss of use of gate/plane/crew and CS agents are unable to work the nect flight when processing both the VDBs and IDBs.)

Better software, better economic model (significantly more complex though.) UA's system isn't designed to optimize revenue on a flight by flight basis, but to optimize revenue on a systemic basis. Maxing out the prerated flight revenue of 1 plane may not be the best move for the revenue of the system as a whole. Selling a full fare seat (the last seat on the plane) for ORD-STL at $600 sounds great, but if in so doing in, you miss out on a FRA-ORD-STL booking worth $2k, you have hurt the system revenue at the cost of segment revenue. UA's system=system revenue based, not leg revenue based. Leg based revenue systems is so 1970s/1980s, while network based systems are late 90s/today. Prior to UA buying "Deep Blue" from IBM in the late 90's there were no computers capable of doing large scale network revenue modeling in a real world aplication time frame. Thanks to Moore's law, it is a possibility now that didn't exist 15 years ago. If you've ever been to UA's old HQ (not the new downtown place,) I BELIEVE (not sure) that the pond there isn't so the geese can play, but was used for cooling, as there is a huge bank of compressors and fans with next to the big pond with coils running to the pond. I'm betting the mainframes were part of the reason for the heat exchange, but that is only conjecture on my part.

That's cool. :) Thanks for the informed perspective, fastair!

I don't disagree with any of that, but it doesn't make my point "incorrect" - the reality is that IDBs on any US airline are few and far between - we are really dealing in the margins of insignificance.

The new "standard" offer as being defined in the training going out to GAs is to offer based on the lowest fare in the market, rounded up to the nearest $50 and no lower than $100 nor higher than $400.

I've also heard that they are possibly going to be less inclined to accept refundable fares for VDBs or to accept repeat customers, though I didn't see that in the documentation I was able to sneak a peek at.
They care in the sense that they report on them, but I've never seen the government take action against an airline for IDBs, other than when they neglect to properly inform customers of their rights in such cases.

Where's the correlation? Can you show that IDB rate is related in any way to on-time performance?

Unless the GAs "nickel-and-diming" customers actually has any impact on the dispatch times of flights - something that has not been shown in any way - then this is a straight red herring. It is like saying that the company has one of the industry's poorest on-time records because they don't put olives on the salads.

Show something resembling a connection, other than just a personal hunch, and it might be an interesting topic to analyze further. As it stands right now it is just a joke.

Here's the actual data, IDBs per 10,000 customers and on-time rates for the past 4 years. There's no correlation at all that I can find. Perhaps someone else sees some.


If the correlation premise is correct then we should see carriers with lowed IDB rates have higher on-time numbers, right? Or that YoY the same carrier should have a higher on-time rate when they have lower IDB rates, right?

What the data does show is that AS, with their very high on-time numbers, also has middle to bad IDB numbers, while B6, with virtually zero IDBs has pretty poor on-time numbers. F9 cut their IDB rate by more than half YoY from 2010 to 2011 but also dropped a couple points in on-time performance. And UA's major carrier-leading on-time performance in 2010 that they bragged about so much occurred commensurate with an IDB rate 20% higher than 2011's and nearly the same as 2009's, but the on-time performance those years was markedly worse. WN's best on-time performance in the past 4 years came with their highest IDB rates, too.

There's no correlation. There's no causation. There's just FUD being spewed.

I always wonder - has anyone use a full Y to earn VDB whatever they want?

Since DL is doing some of these already, I won't be surprise if these happen.

But rejecting a previous VDBed customer from another VDB will resolve oversale problem?

Actually the numbers above neither prove or disprove any correlation related to the GA software being used. The only way those numbers would accurately show correlation is if the carriers in question had the same VDB procedures and training, the same overselling patterns, the same boarding procedures, etc., etc., etc., while having the GA software as the primary difference. All of those other factors vary greatly from one carrier to another in the list so you can't use the numbers to isolate on GA software as the deciding factor one way or the other.

Nothing in the numbers either supports or refutes anyone's claims about the effect of GA software used during VDB situations on delayed departures.

Yes. Some have even been banned from flying on carriers due to abuse of said behavior.

Who said anything about it relating to the software? I'm simply trying to establish whether there is a correlation between IDB rates and on-time percentages, akin to this line:
Regardless of how the agents process it, the data does not seem to support that there is any relationship, correlation or causation between on-time performance and IDB rates. If there is, I'd love to see an explanation of it. But the data doesn't seem to suggest any correlation that I can track.

In the interest of keeping this discussion on ArmchairAirlineExecutiveTalk (TM) somewhat coherent, I'd like to point out that the word "software" does not appear anywhere else in this thread. In other words, nobody has (so far) suggested the existence of "any correlation related to the GA software being used". Inasmuch as correlation has been discussed at all, it's purely the [putative] correlation between IDB rates and on-time rates. Not whether such correlation might be due to GA software.

So, in this thread, I don't believe there were any "claims about the effect of GA software used during VDB situations on delayed departures," even implicitly. It all started (this time) with channa's suggestion that CO should improve their on-time performance instead of worrying about VDB compensation. That implies a policy causation (late departures because managers have spent too much time worrying about VDB policy, instead of optimizing on-time departure), rather than a software causation.

That said, I'm provisionally convinced by sbm12's data suggesting no observable correlation at all. (To remove "provisional" I'd have to scatterplot the data points and do a regression, which doesn't seem especially fun or worth the effort).

CO is Doing a Smart Thing
 

1. You can't look at the raw metrics quoted in this thread as informing any serious decision by a for-profit business. The question isn't how many seats you are selling, but the revenue for the marginal seat you sell. If you sell one more seat than you actually have, that is, oversell by 1 and sell that seat at full Y (9-10x the price of the lowest-priced seat), it's probably a good thing, even if you wind by with IDB +1 and the reporting that goes with it.

2. Generally-speaking, when I see UACO dealing with VDB's at the gate, there is an extra GA assigned (roving supervisor) and the actual boarding process isn't being delayed.

3. CO (and other carriers) are dialing back VDB comp and it's self-evident on many flights that there are people more than willing to take low-end VDB. Sometimes, when the GA announces the offer, including the likely reroute, it's not only low $ but also an inconvenient reroute. But, to somebody with nothing to do, they get some miles, a little bit of cash and are happy.

4. In the end, if stuck with an IDB, it's likely to be one or a combination of of three types of pax:

A. Somebody who missed the boarding cut-off and thus gets $0.
B. Cheap fare
C. No status

5. On the other hand, I see GA doing a better job of artfully finding people with greater flexibility, tolerance for low $, no checked luggage.

6. Lastly, I strongly suspect, although I don't know this, that at least CO's GA's can see on-screen whether the pax is a FVDBS (Frequent Voluntary Denied Boarding Seeker). For business reasons, no carrier wants VDB to be a pax goal, so it would make sense for carriers to use such individuals only as a last resort.

Doesn't count against the IDB stats. :-:

As a matter of fact, the offer has increase - CO was used to begin with $250, but now $300 AFAIK.

Believe me or not, luggage was not the issue at all. I have once VDBed with CO with 2 checked luggages.

At the same time - no one ever tells the airlines to oversell. Please note, in some ways, people who are willing to VDB are in fact doing favors for the airlines.

I don't see how people, even they want to abuse it, can really abuse VDB (except you are buying refundable trying to get off every flight, which is another story).

Sorry, I suffered a complete brain fade this morning and got cross threaded. Yep, nothing about software here... :o:o:o

FWIW, there have been other claims that the software also makes for more IDBs, but that wasn't in this thread, so you aren't completely crazy. :p