Originally Posted by chgoeditor (Post 16456560)

I live in Chicago, so to just add a few data points:
1. Today (Thursday): It's been raining on and off here all day. I drove downtown at noon & the fog/cloud cover was so low that I couldn't see above about the 50th floor of the John Hancock building.
2. Yesterday (Wednesday): Yesterday's weather couldn't have been nastier. Rain & dark clouds in the morning followed by a brief clearing followed by dense fog in the afternoon, followed by more rain.
3. Yesterday (Wednesday): Oh, and huge storms (tornadoes) across Kansas & Missouri yesterday, throwing, which surely led to a lot of cancellations on flights coming from the south and west. Of course, that leads to cascading delays.
4. Yesterday (Wednesday): I mainly fly AA, and know that AA posted on their FB page yesterday that a lot of flights out of DFW were cancelled yesterday as planes were inspected for hail damage. (Of course, that leads to cascading delays, too.)
5. Tuesday: Tornadoes roll through Oklahoma City & shut down a lot of flights out of Dallas, etc. (See item #4 for just one example of the aftermath.)
6. Sunday: Massive tornadoes roll through Joplin, Missouri. Again, these lead to cascading delays & cancellations.
7. Last Friday & Saturday: Fog so thick in Chicago that you couldn't see more than a few dozen yards at times.
8. Today: I'm currently looking at a NBC News weather map that's showing the entire eastern half of the country--from Chicago/Dallas & on--at risk for severe thunderstorms & possible tornadoes over the next 24 hours.

So, just to recap, the midwest has been stuck in a horrible weather pattern for a week now. Recovering from a single weather delay can take a day or two. Recovering from day after day after day of horrible weather can take a lot longer. Do you know anyone who tried to fly to/from the east coast between December 26 and early January? I was on one of the last flights out of PHL on the 26th, but there were people who slept at airports for days because--unlike in rainy, foggy conditions--driving hundreds of miles in a blizzard just wasn't an option.

If I were in your shoes and looking at the current weather forecast in Chicago, I'd be booking a car/train/bus to Detroit for your friends. It's the only logical option.

Originally Posted by Rommie2k6 (Post 16454728)

It's like risk management. If you know your flights from a certain airport have a high probability of getting delayed, you should analyze the problem and come up with solution including contingency plans, maybe having a plane or two on standby to ramp up capacity later when the skies are clear. Unfortunately this is not how the airline industry operates since it costs money, and we know how good the airline industry is at gouging their customers and providing crap service especially one carrier called United.

They were not informed of any weather waiver, and in any case, I am unsure how United is going to refund part of an itinerary in a multi-stop ticket. United's website also seems to indicate the travel waiver is a promise for no additional-fees for rescheduled flights (which is to be entitlement but they are making it sound like it's not) and not a refund for cancellation. The URL to Chicago waiver is not even working, great job United! Again the United staff must have LIED to poor folks that have no internet access. If anything this episode that shown that United lies to their customer habitually, because they think they can get away with it... should have told my folks to fly with Delta, which is the normal carrier I use.

Originally Posted by Rommie2k6 (Post 16454070)

Overbooking is as unpredictable as the weather, so why is there compensation for one but not the other?

Originally Posted by clarence5ybr (Post 16484286)

The weather is unpredictable, overbooking is not. The airlines deliberately overbook flights--for example, they know they have x seats on a plane, but they sell x + 5 tickets. Unless airlines are much more powerful than I know, they can't deliberately change the weather. Thus, the two are not the same.

The airlines have historical data that let them predict how many people will be no-shows on given flights, so on the majority of overbooked flights, they don't need to bump anyone. The airlines know that there will be some flights where more people show up than there are seats, and they will have to pay compensation. However, they know that the revenue from the additional tickets they can sell outweighs the bump compensation they'll have to pay.

If I knew for sure that I could win horse racing bets 80% of the time, I'm not going to care about the 20% of the bets I lose, because I'll be making a profit even factoring in the losses.

Originally Posted by Ancien Maestro (Post 16484464)

I'm starting to understand more why airlines overbook....more confirmations now means more revenue

Originally Posted by clarence5ybr (Post 16487571)

Also, keep in mind that even when they 'lose' the overbooking game, the airlines often still win.

As seats get scarce, airlines pull the discounted fare buckets, so the fares they sell to overbook will be in the higher fare buckets, if not full Y. Compare the price of a typical full-Y fare to typical VDB or even IDB compensation rates, and you'll see that even if the airline has to IDB someone on one or two of your flight legs because they sold you an 'overbooked' ticket, they'll probably still come out ahead in monetary terms.

Certainly IDB creates bad-will that could impact future business, but often the VDB offers are often accepted, and they're typically a win-win (the airline still made money after paying the VDB compensation, the VDB pax is happy they got 'paid' hundreds of dollars to wait a few hours).

Originally Posted by JohnnyColombia (Post 16451754)

I think you could probably argue that your full and equal rights of conscience as an atheist have been infringed and they would probably give you a hotel voucher and a sandwich