When a flight sells out, most people assume that the ledger book closes, the flight is full, the plane flies and everyone’s a happy camper. Secretly though, the airlines don’t do this. Depending on the market and the flight, often times airlines will sell seats they don’t even have, strictly for the purpose of maximizing profit and loads.
It’s called inventory management, or simply, overbooking. Say on a 100 seat jet, your statistical data suggest that two people are going to miss the flight. So you sell 102 seats and assume the flight will be 100% full. The two people who should statistically miss the flight are stuck and will need to buy another ticket, while you keep the profit from the extra two sold tickets as overhead. Alternatively, if 102 people actually show up, the extra two people can be bumped, rebooked on different routes and the airline will fork over a couple hundred bucks. Either way, the airlines win.
Obviously, certain markets have a tendency to have more no-shows. LAX could have a high volume of overbooks because of the hideous traffic around the area and large number of seats on outbound jets. Conversely, Houghton, MI will have fewer overbooks because they know 99.9% of people make their flights. Of course, all of this data is hush hush and the airlines won’t discuss how or to what extent they overbook their jets.
The problem is that most people believe that a bump is going to create all sorts of problems and that they’re not going to get home until next Tuesday. That’s not necessarily true; a little research and planning can often guarantee you get home that same night, if not barely later than originally scheduled, if not earlier. With the tools and knowledge below, you can shift the power from the gate agent to yourself, massaging the system to ultimately get you the vouchers and itinerary that you want.
Ask yourself first though whether you want to devote the care and patience to ruining a perfectly good itinerary and sacrificing your travel plans to the gods. For some people its just not worth the 300$ voucher or the free ticket in exchange for the potential hours of waiting around in an airport or sitting in the middle seat in the back of the plane. For people like me with time to kill and an empty pocketbook though, defeating the system is a small grain of justice for the atrocities that we have to put up with on a daily basis, in our lives, and all around us.