bearkatt

http://www.chron.com/business/articl...g-11103912.php I see where southwest is going to stop overbooking. they are the worst. perhaps all the airlines will soon follow.

mduell

Why wouldn't it be an app? An app lets the front line can immediately resolve the issue by providing some comp, rather than calling in to some opaque back office policy oversight office

PaulInTheSky

$10k is fine. Some tickets of one-way premier Y/J/F can go up to $10k per ticket. Again, this is showing UA is doing whatever they can to improve customer service, which is not terrible. They should just follow Southwest to completely forfeit overbooking.

mduell

If there's open seats on the plane, none of the "creative solutions" are necessary. Out of scope for this discussion of creative solutions for pax but not crew.

Insulator-King

Indeed.

In the USA, LEO's [Law Enforcement Officers] are going to body cams precisely because the video shows what is happening. What it shows is incontravertible. Sure it may not show the beginning, but it certainly shows the end, which is valuable in itself.

jsloan

Eliminating overbooking would be a net loss for the 99.996% of people who are not IDBed on any given day. UA's ability to overbook helps keep fares low -- they can afford to sell discount fares even when the plane is nearing capacity if they have the ability to oversell. Assuming there's no IDB, everyone wins: the last-minute traveler gets to his destination, UA makes more money, and someone gets a voucher. If they eliminate the ability to overbook, they're not going to do that by saying "oh well, I guess the plane filled up with $99 G fares." They're going to put aggressive caps on the lower fares in order to ensure that they have seats available for purchase at the last minute.

Or, more simply: If it is profitable to overbook a plane, and an airline elects not to use this process, in order to keep their profit the same, the airline must raise prices or cut costs. Neither of those options is attractive to me.

Paplover

As a DL Diamond Medallion who collected over $10K in VDB over the last two years I can give some insight into the DL system. The bids are effectively ignored in over 90% of the cases, I suspect they are a data mining system but those volunteers do provide a starting point for GA. The bids are solicited only when DL expects a flight to be oversold and stop when there are enough bidders. The minimum I have seen offered at a gate is $400 and everyone gets whatever it took to get the last needed volunteer. Rerouting is a factor and GA's have refused me due to routing issues (overnight elsewhere, too hard, etc.). Only a few hubs offer gift cards, all other locations are non-transferable travel vouchers. The highest I have seen before this month was $1200 in vouchers and $200 in cards and still no takers so sometimes $2K or more really is needed.

prestonh

UA was never overbooking on the S T L G fares I can assure you that. If anything, they will just cut back on the number of deep discount offerings and charge 10-20% more on the walk-up fares. so that 6:30pm ORD-LAX flight with 2 seats left you just showed up for at 5:15pm? Yup, you are going to pay more to upfare/change. But if there's demand then maybe UA will figure out they can upgauge. I mean one of the pieces of market information is that if people aren't willing to be bought away from their destination for thousands of $, then it must be in high demand to travel to at that hour/day vs. other times of day/week where it is easy to solicit volunteers.

jsloan

You're making my point. Video is prejudicial because people tend to give it additional weight, as they assume it is accurate. It's a lot easier for the average person to determine when someone might be lying -- it's a survival skill that most people learn at a fairly young age -- than it is for someone to analyze a video and realize that it's incomplete.

Many people who saw the first video of Dr. Dao, which started too late to provide any context, jumped to all sorts of conclusions, and then proceeded to dismiss anything that attempted to provide that context as being untruthful. Just review the massive thread here if you'd like to see. :-) It is extremely difficult to overcome the perception that "seeing is believing," even if, intellectually, a person understands that they're not seeing the whole story.

Well, yes and no. My most recent oversold flight was IAH-DFW. I purchased a G fare about 72 hours prior to departure, as the seat map was wide open. The evening before my flight, DFW had some terrible weather and they ended up diverting several flights to IAH. They zeroed the flight out that evening, and ended up 6 over, as they actually rebooked displaced passengers to create the oversale. I found alternate space via AA, volunteered, and was all set to collect my voucher when they paged me and asked if I'd like to go on a positioning flight instead. They basically took the 6 people at the top of the upgrade list and put us onto an E-175 in F along with about 20 deadheaders in Y. It's the only time I've ever flown in a regional jet from C terminal at IAH...

I've also SDC'ed onto a flight that ended up oversold; I think that one was K class but it might have been L.

So, while I know they would prefer to limit oversells to YBM-type classes, they definitely don't always do that in practice. Anyway, having them limit the number of deep discount seats is just another way to say they'll raise the average cost of being on the plane. :-)

richarddd

Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable and most people believe they are better at detecting lying than they actually are.

It's not unheard of for other forms of evidence to be incomplete.

jsloan

Fair, but jurors are still aware that people may lie. If they can't tell who's lying, well, that's why they have more than one juror. :-)

My point is simply that video makes a strong, emotional pull on people. There's a reason that television ads are much more expensive than billboard or print ads; they're more effective. People believe their eyes, even when they shouldn't.

itsallgood

EXACTLY! There are consequences to these changes.

The core problem is that airline ticket prices are too low. There are more people buying tickets than the system can handle. Basic economics says to add capacity and/or raise prices. Adding too much capacity carries huge risks for economic downturns (remember post 9/11?) so the best solution for airlines is to raise ticket prices.

WineCountryUA

Topic Reminder

This is the UA forum and the topic of the thread is the overbooking and denied boarding policies changes UA announced on 27 April 2017.

Off topic items like the veracity / completeness of various forms of "evidence" is a subject better for other forums. Let's return to the UA related discussion.

WineCountryUA
UA coModerator

claaaaaydavis

Upgrades still barely clear. Here's hoping enough people stay away to make them useful again

aoumd

Thanks for enlightening me as to the pmUA situation. Very different than what UA has become, and ironic given that Bethune hired SMI/J and yet Bethune ran a CO ship that did all the things Oscar needs to get UA to start doing again.