So you like paying to check luggage?
Even on Southwest if you pay a small amount they will automatically check you in before anyone else, which is useful if you are going to be unavailable 24 hours before. But last Thursday I checked into SW using my phone while I was at a party. And got a good position.
Southwest has a special line for people with boarding passes who only have to check luggage. Moves pretty fast. If you are doing carry-on only you can go right to the gate, no line at all.
LSL, you seem to know what you are talking about. Can you confirm or deny my suspicion that it is (also) related to ‘overbooking’? - selling more tickets than seats because you know in advance some people don’t show up in the end?
They’ve been overbooking since the days of the red-carbon paper ticket, but the way I interpret what **LSLGuy **describes is that while before everyone had to check in at the counter before proceeding to the gate so “checked in” was closely tied in with “at least showed up at the terminal”, now you have some more people who both buy *and *check in, *yet *don’t show up anyway, resulting in repeated “Veeblefetzer, party of two, in 5 minutes the flight will be closed and pushed off” calls and keeping someone else from having that seat until the very last instant.
I suppose the 24hr window is just considered a reasonable margin for people to take care of advance check-in without leaving too much margin for attrition or unexpected changes. Myself when/if flying on Southwest (and there are many times that’s a reasonable choice) I do pay the $12.50 for automated check-in at the 24h mark because I find the convenience worth it; but if flying on an assigned-seat carrier I usually just try to have the passes in my hand before I leave the house/hotel, if flying in the morning I’ll print them when going to bed (I don’t feel comfortable relying exclusively on a smartphone-screen boarding pass scancode).
As JRD said.
Overbooking started in the 1960s. It isn’t new. And it has pretty much zero to do with early check-in.
Overbooking exists entirely because a ticket does not, and never did, guarantee you a seat. That’s what a reservation is for. It takes both to travel.
Which also means that if you buy a ticket, make a reservation, then no-show the flight, your ticket is still good tomorrow. Just make a fresh reservation & fly on the original ticket. Try that at a sporting event or stage play sometime and tell me how it works out for you.
The reason the airlines overbook is that customers overbook too; making multiple reservations intending to use just one. Plus the inevitable percentage of short notice “stuff happens” that derail travel plans.
A feature of airline inventory management since the 1970s is something called “flight firming”. Which is the process of smoking out the fake or duplicate reservations that will probably go empty. The sooner they can be detected, the sooner those seats can be resold to somebody who will actually show up. Early check-in is one more brick in the flight firming arsenal. Said another way, a smaller percentage of early check-ins no-show than do folks that don’t do early check-in. So the more the industry can encourage early check-in the firmer the flights get earlier.
When you couple a firmer flight with the modern internet sales systems where we can sell inventory at a good price even up to six hours before departure, you improve the overall load factor and yield. Which can lead to higher profits (or lower prices) overall. Empty seats are no good for anybody.
Said another way, early check-in reduces the need for speculative statistical overbooking and replaces it with actual late bookings for actual no-shows.
Overbooking today is a very, very small percentage of the total. And is vastly less today than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago. Better computer modelling and all that. Plus the better flight firming from early check-in.
If you (any you) has a bee under your bonnet about overbooking you’re under-informed about the reality and reacting on emotion to something you don’t understand.
Here are two older threads on overbooking with additional explanations by myself and others:
Why is overbooking legal? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board from 2015
Explain airline overbooking to me - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board from 2005
It’s interesting to see the progress of technology and business practices.
How does overbooking actually *work *though, for airlines that book by individual seat and not like Southwest’s general first come first served style? Do they sell the same seat number twice? How? Sold seats are no longer available to choose when booking. Or is that what Standby is for?
(Almost all of my flying experience has been Continental/United.)
I vastly prefer to pay for a specific seat on an airline with reserved seating, than deal with Southwest. Having an early boarding number on Southwest doesn’t guarantee a good seat - you’re still after all the pre-boarders, and any passengers connecting through wherever the plane came from. You can be A1 and (if you’re particularly unlucky) there might not be a window or aisle seat open until row 10.
This brings to mind a followup question (I know some people will say “read those previous threads” but they didn’t answer my question): why do they overbook at all? Tickets are already non-refundable. What do they care if I paid my $250 but don’t show up? If anything it saves them money if a few people don’t show up because they got those people’s money and save on fuel because the plane is lighter.
Oh woe, an aisle seat in row 18… 
Accordng to one of the earlier threads: (a) the preselected seat is not a guarantee and (b) a number of seats are kept ***not ***available for preselection, so a number of tickets necessarily do not get assigned a seat until actual check-in (I suspect mostly sold by third party agencies).
Many of these policies are evolutionary descendants of the time when the airlines handled their tickets in the style of the railroads - as LSLGuy said, the ticket and the reservation theoretically separate. Once you paid, you could vary when you used the paid-for passage. Yes, nowadays we have nonrefundable nonreusable cost-more-than-the-price-to-rebook ticketing but that’s just one of two dozen ticketing/fare classes that are actually used on a particular flight, not absolutely everyone uses that(*).
(*The algorithms that make it so there’s two dozen different fare/ticketing classes on the same flight are those that make it possible for someone to fly on the really cheap so the public may complain, but they actually want it…)
Protip for flying southwest into Burbank, they let you off the back of the plane as well as the front. This essentially doubles the number of “good seats”.
On the major airlines, not all tickets are non-refundable. Generally, the refundable tickets cost a lot more, but if you want one, you can certainly buy one.
Even the non-refundable tickets aren’t really non-refundable. On the major airlines (except WN) you can change your flight for a $200 fee plus fare difference domestically, and much more internationally. Of course, if the original ticket was less than $200, it might as well be non-refundable. (WN doesn’t charge a fee, just the price differential.)
And even if you are flying on a non-refundable ticket, the airline will not make you buy a new ticket if you misconnect.
And selling the same seat twice is part of the economics of operating an airline. They can afford to sell the seats at a bargain price and sometimes still make a profit because they will collect money from selling some seats twice.
And, anyway, if there are people with money in their hands wanting to get on that flight, would you compel the airline to turn them away and fly a plane with empty seats in it?
On all the major US airlines (now even including WN), if you simply no-show without cancelling, the remainder of your non-refundable ticket is void. Even if you pay a fee. If you want the freedom to simply no-show, you have to buy a refundable ticket.
And if your ticket is non-refundable, you have to pay a fee to make a new reservation (except WN) and possibly a fare-difference.
Not many completely non-refundable.
The check in may also turns a refundable tickets into non-refundable… In that case, the benefit of checking in early is to get the seat you want, and to ensure you get a seat but the drawback is losing the ability to change flight.
Many of the group tour tickets will be bought in bulk and will be totally flexible…The airline has to assume the group will only change the flight if they have very good reason. And when the highways are blocked or some other natural disaster is affecting the area (storms,fire,etc)… the reasons for flight changes tend to cancel out, one group is flying earlier, because they may as well leave early if they can, they can’t go out for the day, they can’t coach it home… and another group is flying later because they can’t get through to the airport.
As one example: At my federal agency we are required to buy refundable tickets for work travel, so that the government does not have to eat the cost if our travel plans change. The government does get special fares even for refundable tickets, though, presumably because it buys in such volume.
I’ve more than once gotten tickets where I couldn’t pick a seat, and it says “check in required.” In that case I usually wind up in a middle seat - it is like they don’t want to admit what they’re doing to me. If enough people get that, they can overbook and not worry about the multiple seat problem.
For United anyway this seldom has happened when booking with my company travel agency, but often happened when I was flying to an NSF review and being paid by the government.
It doesn’t save them nearly as much money as collecting two fares for one seat does. Anyways, not every person who fails to board is a no-show. Some people miss connections, etc.
As others have said.
The vast majority of tickets are not “non-refundable”. Only a tiny minority are like theater seats where you’re either on the booked flight or you forfeit the entire fare. Many airlines don’t even sell tickets like that at all.
Said another way, the tickets with change penalties and such are really this: “We, the airline, will give you, the consumer, a $200 discount off the normal fare if you promise not to screw with us by gaming the *separate ticket + reservation = travel *system. But if you do screw with us anyway, we’ll charge you $150 in change penalties and you’ll still be $50 ahead.”
Flexibility for the consumer has a cost to the airline. As such, they charge something extra for that. *A la carte *pricing is all the rage in more and more industries.
The danger, and it is real, is the whole process becomes more and more baroque with ever-inflating gamesmanship on all sides. Eventually that translates into the belief, accurate or otherwise, that the whole thing is a crooked casino run by, and patronized by, nothing but con-men. I made exactly that comment in a recent thread about the perpetual rolling deep discount sales & coupons policy at Kohl’s.
Thanks for all the explanation LSLGuy.
And for the record: I never intended to imply that overbooking was some sort of scam to rip off honest hard working people, but I must admit my choice of words could give that impression.
There remains however a more general problem, not specific to airtravel: with different prices (‘a la carte pricing’ - I learned a new term today!), not to mention discounts, coupons, in- or excluding specific services etc, it can be quite hard for a simple consumer to distinguish the end result of the complexities of modern micro-economic insights geared toward efficiency from attempts to obscure ‘real’ prices or downright rip you off.
Because if you only have the single carry-on bag, you avoid the check-in queue. Check in on-line, print off your ticket, and go straight through.