Stocktc1

Or do they only do vouchers for overbooking situations ?

previous flight got cancelled so I thought they would ask people to give up their seats for them….

cbn42

No, typically they don't do that. It costs a lot of money to entice someone to give up a seat, so they only do it if there is no other option.

teddybear99

That is why they will put you on the next AVAILABLE flight, not the next flight which also may be oversold and have extra passengers who need to be bumped.

pinniped

For overbooking it's *almost* always vouchers.

I've had one exception in my life. Checking in for DUB-ORD one morning, the EI agent said they needed 5 volunteers to move from the earlier to the later flight to ORD, about three hours later. Compensation was 400 euros per passenger. We were a party of five, so we said sure...we assumed we'd get a 400 euro EI voucher each. It's another off-peak coach trip to Ireland, basically... So the agent rebooked us, gives us new boarding passes, and disappeared into a back room for a moment. When she came back, she handed us a fat envelope stuffed with 50's and said have a nice day. A nice day, indeed!!

MiamiAirport Formerly NY George

Nope they won't ask for bump volunteers to accommodate standby passengers. They will, however, in the case of displaced passengers make sure the premium cabin doesn't go out empty by bumping up elites in coach to first/business.

LondonElite

I've received cash and I've received travel money.

ATOBTTR

For VDBs (Voluntary Denied Boarding), in the US, it's usually an airline voucher, though a few years ago Delta experimented with offering gift cards for other companies (including an AmEx gift card) beyond just airline vouchers.

For IDB (Involuntary Denied Boarding), again in the US, while the airline may try to offer a voucher, the customer is entitled to request cash compensation of the same amount, per DOT regulations.

Scots_Al

That’s the law in the EU and when flying to the EU on an EU carrier.

sethweinstein

Lufthansa paid me a €600 VDB a couple of years ago but wanted to process it as a credit on a credit card. I had to think which card I had with me that had the least-valuable points!

Seth

pinniped

One other thing to add, that possibly makes things harder for the people on the original canceled flight: the airlines' software has gotten a lot better when it comes to determining how far to overbook a flight.

In the 1990s, I reaped piles of AA vouchers from VDB. If an early flight was canceled, they'd confirm pax on subsequent flights - in other words, one cancel might create 5 overbooked flights later that day. They'd happily overbook a 727 by 30+ people. I had days where I was able to roll from one flight to the next three times and collect a total of $1000-1500 in vouchers and finally fly out at 10PM on the last flight. For some flights, the agents would be processing 10 or 20 VDBs

Now, the software is usually smart enough to not push a flight over by 30 people a couple hours before departure. They're more likely to have all of those cancellation victims go on the standby list, and roll from flight to flight as standbys, with their confirmed seats being the late night or even next day flights. When a flight ends up needing VDBs, it's usually low single digits.

So the original premise - offering you a VDB to make room for someone coming from an earlier canceled flight - happens far less than it once did.

TGarza

I have received both from Southwest in the last year.