Over the weekend of April 8, a now-infamous video surfaced showing a man being forcibly dragged out of his seat on an United Airlines flight because he refused to leave and wait for another flight to take him to his destination.
While the actions of the airline and its officers were clearly reprehensible and thus widely condemned, many people started questioning why an airline would sell more tickets than there were available seats on a commercial flight.
At first glance, this would seem like a terribly unfair decision, as there would likely be passengers who would have to leave the flight and wait on another one. However, airline companies have well-researched and legitimate reasons for overbooking their flights.
What is important to remember when examining this issue, is the fact on every flight, there are always going to be passengers who do not show up. This can be due to a variety of reasons, ranging from bad traffic to oversleeping.
In order to avoid losing revenue from these unfilled seats, airline companies have found it to be more cost-effective to simply overbook their flights, so they will not endure such heavy revenue losses.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, airlines attempt to calculate these numbers through proprietary algorithms so they can anticipate how many passengers are going to miss the flight in question. The objective of the algorithms is to find a number that will allow the airline to fill the flight to capacity without having to voluntarily or involuntarily remove passengers from the flight.
It should be pointed out, while these algorithms are quite accurate most of the time, they are not perfect.
According to Business Insider, in 2016 about 51,000 people were involuntarily denied from boarding their flights. While this seems like an eye-popping number, it only accounts for less than one percent of the 823 million passengers who flew on U.S. airlines during the last calendar year.
There is even evidence overbooking could be advantageous for consumers, as it can work to keep prices down. In a TIME magazine interview, a consumer advocate named Charles Leocha said if overbooking were to become illegal, the price of a ticket on every flight would surely increase.
This is because in that situation, the airlines would have to make sure that if passengers did not show up for a flight, they would still be able to cover the costs of flying a plane that is not completely full. Therefore, there would have to be a price increase for all passengers.
In conclusion, airlines overbook flights to make up for passengers who miss their flights. It is statistically unlikely you would be involuntarily denied boarding and the legality of overbooking helps keep flight prices lower.
None of this is to say it is not a huge pain to be denied boarding and there is always room for airlines to improve the models they use to calculate how many passengers are likely to miss a flight. In fact, there is nothing inherently wrong with consumers wanting airlines to reevaluate how they conduct their overbooking policies.
The problem is, in the past week, far too many people have ignorantly assumed the airlines handle overbooking this way because they are oppressive, bloodsucking capitalist pigs, instead of understanding airlines do this based on in-depth historical research and proprietary algorithms.
To this end, it will do little good for people to push for banning overbooking on commercial flights. However, there are plenty of reasons for consumers to push for more effective strategies in handling the problems that arise from overbooking.
