An interesting point that was raised on the VIP Day (see thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=729227 ) was that they're experiencing less and less no-shows nowadays.

In the operations piece of the tour, they said in prior years, CO would see 10% of bookings simply not show for their flight. Today, they said that number is closer to 4% which makes planning for bumps on the airline side a little more challenging. People who book flights today are much more likely to be on that plane compared to a year ago.

While the involuntary/voluntary denied boarding numbers speak for themselves, have you noticed your own no-show rate changing on CO --and if so, why?

I've been booking a lot of full Y's (or better) lately ...on CO and other carriers. My schedule has been a bit crazy, so of my last 10 flights booked, I flew 2 and cancelled the other 8 less than 72 hours but more than 24 hours out. I haven't no-showed on a flight (or missed one) in a very long time. I'm wondering if others are in the same boat ....or maybe there's so many penalties and restrictions on non-Y tickets today compared to previous years that people are doing everything possible to make the flight they're booked on.

In 2006 I flew 125 CO segments with just one VDB voucher "score".

So far in 2007 I've taken advantage of seven bumps (total $2200) due to oversold CO aircraft (with 62 CO segments flown).

The down-side is my upgrade rate (PLAT) is just 36% this year (vs 73% in 2006).

I would absolutely agree that the no-show rate is down........

There are two unique distinctions the airlines focus on, one is cancellations prior to day of departure, and the other is no show at the gate. Both are forecasted independently and incorporated into the overbooking profile for the flight. At the moment, most carriers use historically booking/cancellation statistics to forecast the cancellations prior to departure, and information from the departure control system to forecast day of departure no shows. I know the airlines have discussed drilling into lower levels of detail such as e-tickets over paper ones, if passengers order special meal options, connections, interline bookings, Frequent Flier profiles etc., to get better forecasts, but as far as I know, they either haven't gotten to that level of detail, or they thought it created too much noise in their forecasts.

I think another factor that has contributed to lower no show rates is corporate travel. Many frequent fliers have moved to private aircraft as the price and convenience has become more reasonable and the hassle of flying commercial has increased. Those type of travelers were notorious for having multiple back up options if their meeting ran late. Taking them out of the passenger pool reduces some of the irrational booking behavior.

I think CO's yield management team is eerily accurate in their load predictions. Since I started flying CO six or seven years ago, I've only scored VDBs for weight and balance issues on ERJs.

I thought the whole point of the "no value after departure" restriction on virtually all non-refundable coach tickets was to reduce the no-show factor and aid in planning with regard to oversale. Now it is working too well? You can't have it both ways.

FWIW:
Three of my seven VDBs this year were for oversold ERJ145s
All were over by 2 pax (52 seats sold).