AirPORT food, real resturants. NOT AirLINE food, which is rejected by famine victims.
That all passengers are not created equal. That is, if a customer cancels last minute, and you don’t refund his money, you inevitably lose not only his immediate business, but also all future business.
OTOH, if you overbook, you can inevitably find someone on the flight who will take one 3 hours later in return for a $400 voucher. Now, you’ve got a decent shot at repeat business from the guy who cancelled, and a happy person who will be telling everyone what a great airline you were.
The secret is asking for the vegetarian meal. It’s real food! I always request it, and end up with yummy things like granola and yogurt and fruit salad for breakfast while everyone else is staring at their mystery-meat-and-possible-eggs-oh-let’s-call-it-“scramble”. With warm orange slices on top.
/hijack
I don’t know of any airline who would charge you for missing a connecting flight. They have a contractual obligation to get you to your destination. I think they still give hotel vouchers, but it isn’t as good as it used to be. I’ve been put on other airlines in some cases.
Ugh. When my daughter was in her vegetarian stage she requested these meals - which were more disgusting than the normal ones. I don’t think this works anymore.
OTOH, airport food is a lot better than it used to be. At one point the best you can expect is some hours old hot dog from a bar, or over priced dry sandwich. Recently I’ve had quite decent barbecue in airports - not world class, but not too bad.
Right, but the overbooking policy doesn’t always fill the plane and it has costs - e.g. the money/tickets given to bumped passengers.
None whatever. But for your flight to LasVegas you went with Company B, which probably means you got a cheaper ticket in exchange for less freedom to alter your travel plans.
I reserved my round trip ticket, including aisle seats for there and back, online this spring. I sat/slept in the middle of the row, there and back, 9+ hours each way.
Virgin Atlantic told me (paraphrased) that I did not get my chosen seats because I did not check in more than 2 hours before departure. (It was more like 1-3/4 hours before.) The VA reps could have told me that, because I used an online ticket seller that was not the VA website, 2+ people in the world reserved the same seats simultaneously. Or they could have told me something more plausible and less risible.
If thousands of the teeming millions have had the same, or similar, experience with the same airline, then you might want to choose another airline. On the positive side, I really liked VA’s wide selection of viewables and playables, and their in-flight service in general.
I’ve also flown Air France twice in recent years, and have received both the seats that I reserved online and very good service in steerage.
I am one of the lucky few who are able to take vacations and travel, and I can tune out the bad stuff, saving the stories for entertaining conversation later. Of course, it also helps to be able to choose a competitor for the next trip.
Airline type here.
Overbooking began back in the early 1960s & really got going when computers were first introduced in the late 1960s.
The critical thing to understand about traditional tikcketing is that a ticket gave you the right to travel from here to there, and a reservation was for a space on a specific flight on a specific date. You could have one or the other without having both, and they’re really disconnected concepts until you board the aircraft.
Imagine a baseball team that just sold tickets, and you could show up for any game with any ticket and sit in any seat. That’s how the airlines worked. Because that’s how the railroads had worked before them.
With a ticket, you could make a “reservation” for a seat on a flight. But if you no-showed for any reason, you did NOT forfeit the ticket, unlike for a baseball game. You could use the ticket on the next filght, or one tomorrow or next week or … No penalty, no charge, just call up and make a new reservation for your as-yet unused ticket.
And you didn’t really need a reservation. If you had a ticket, you could just mosey out to the airport no-notice and get on the next flight that was going where your ticket said. For major routes, there might have been 5-10 flights a day. Take your pick.
Pretty quickly the customers realized they could make multiple reservations, say for the noon flight in case the meeting was over early, the 5pm flight in case the meeting ran as expected, and the 10pm flight just in case the meeting ran long. All at no cost to the consumer. One ticket, three reservations. Or, what if the car broke down on the way to the airport, the traffic was bad, the dog ran away, whatever. You no-show, the plane leaves with an empty seat, never to be reused, but you still get passage tomorrow at no additional charge.
A departed empty seat is like rotten fruit at the grocery store. The merchant has paid 100% of the cost of the goods, and has zero opportunity to EVER sell the item for even a penny per hundred wasted items.
Overbooking began as a way to offset the statistical certainty that a few people will no-show on every flight.
Naturally over time the airlines got greedy, as the consumers had been before them and they started overbooking to ensure a full flight every time, even if that meant people were turned away on most flights. So after a few years the Feds stepped in during the late 1980s and required compensation be paid to overbooked folks who were denied boarding due to lack of seats. The airlines were given the right to call for volunteers and provide token compensation to them, as opposed to the heftier compensation the law mandates for an involuntary denied boarding.
Finally, fast forward to today. Tickets have change penalties and rebooking fees and all sorts of stuff to tie down the consumer & minimize their desire or ability to be flexible. Meanwhile, the consumers are scamming the bumped pax compensation system as hard as they can. Both sides are cheating as fast as they can and moaning about how lousy the other side is treating them. It’s a pathological mess we’ve backed into.
But as we see from several comments above, an airline that tried switching to sports-style ticketing is getting hammered by the consumer attitude. By sports-style I means that you buy a particular seat on a particular flight on a particular day and the ticket is forfeit when the airplane leaves without you, just as yesterday’s unused baseball ticket is a fine souvenir but good for nothing else. Apparently the public HATES that idea when applied to airlines, even when a 100% guarantee of no overboooking goes with it.
I’m not sure how to get out of this rip-off arms race we’re in, but a lot of people inside and out of the industry would love to do so.