What have you seen as the most often oversold flight on your airline? What route/days of the week? Any compensation offered for taking later flights?

Personally, anything to San Diego or LA on a sunday, or leaving Vegas on a sunday is pretty assured to be oversold. $300 is typically offered on AA/HP/DL..

SAN isn't the world's biggest attraction... i've flown on sundays plenty of times on NW and alas, no bumps.

LAX is a different story though...

YMMV though... yield management at least on NW is pretty good.. they're filling a ton of flights but not requiring a slew of bumps.

Not a big data point, but here goes ...

I've been commuting MSP-BUF on NW for a few months. My routing has been MSP-BUF or MSP-DTW-BUF on the way out, and BUF-MSP or BUF-DTW-MSP on the way back.

The MSP-DTW legs, the BUF-DTW and BUF-MSP trips (Thurs or Friday to BUF, returning on Monday) are almost always 100% full. I'm sure Yield Management is not that perfect, so there must be a few bumps occuring there.

It was several years ago, but I used to fly AA DFW-YYZ on Monday mornings. They were ALWAYS seeking volunteers, and usually had to go from $200 up to $500 to get enough. The later flight would have meant a 5pm arrival instead of noon.

This really doesn't appear to have anything to do with miles or points, so I'll move it over to TravelBuzz.

Regards,

Flipside

Somewhat OT, but the puddle jumpers out of DEN to GUC, MJT, etc. are not so much oversold, but may be weight restricted, causing essentially an oversold situation. Any summertime flight I've ever taken from DEN-GUC (dash-8, 37 seats) has been weight restricted, sometimes all the way down to 20 seats, and perhaps 28 have been sold. This results in frequent bumps, whether voluntary or otherwise. The remedy (outside of the free ticket you're given) is usually putting you on a later evening flight when it cools down, or first thing (6am) the next morning before it heats up.
FYI - huge post on this topic (to some extent) in UA MP forum dealing with minors who were IDB'd from a DEN-MTJ flight earlier this summer. Talks about the density altitude calculations and weight restrictions in a few places. No link sorry.

UA any class OGG (or HNL) to LAX , latest afternoon and red-eye Sunday evenings.
And I'd speculate just about any time of the year...

For DL anywhere international and Hawaii are allways oversold. The winter is a different story.

Coming back from Europe right before a major holiday such as Easter ought to increase the chances.

On an unpredictable basis, any time. Saw a very overbooked flight out of Frankfurt last fall but couldn't get bumped. Reason: We were upgrades in business class. Offered to be on any bump list but were told business class would not be called unless they were really, really needing volunteers. So sitting in business class turned out to be a mixed blessing. (Though in balance, certainly worth it, of course, and we were appreciative still of the upgrade -- but we just didn't get all the cookies in the cookie jar.)

I've had three bumps in my last five flights involving America West. Seems, especially during the summer, that they're overbooking an awful lot of flights in and out of their main hub.

Funnily enough I've found transatlantic bumps to be non-existent, or at least out of LGW even around holidays.

Any flight heading from the northeast (NY, NJ, MASS, etc.) to south Florida around Labor Day.

Any flight heading from south Florida to the northeast around Memorial Day.

These mark the beginning and ending of 'snowbird season' to south Florida, where all the retired folk come down from various cold and rainy parts to spend their winter months in paradise.

Summer is a dead zone in south Florida, as they're all gone.

We get lots of Canadians as well, especially from Quebec.

Definately SQ's YVR-ICN-SIN flights. One would have to book very early in advance to secure Y or J seats on board this flight regardless peak or low season. The flight operates 3x/weekly only. It operates under that frequency because of the Canadian government's unwillingness to grant SQ further frequency and access to the Canadian market so SQ has no choice. I'm sure SQ would love to convert it into a daily operation as demand has already proven.

as discussed in the continental forum, newark (EWR) to/from Tel Aviv (TLV) generates mega-bumps.

If you really want to know the answer to this just ask a friendly gate agent. They see infinately more than even the most frequent flyer on this board. So rather than posting our experiences based on smaller numbers of experiences why not have everyone reading this post ask a gate agent what patterns they see and post that here.