Mulling about the Quora website I found the item below:
Q; What would you do if you were involuntarily bumped by any airline on an overbooked flight?
Maxwell Arnold, I’m an informed passenger who knows his rights.
Updated Feb 8, 2018 · Upvoted by Mac Jambo Sinclair, 20 years private pilot
That’s easy. I’d take out my printed copy of the contract of carriage (which I almost always carry with me when flying) and ask them to point out where it says they’re allowed to do that. If they can.
I will make sure that they have agreed in writing (or on video) to provide me with the maximum compensation I’m entitled to.
If they can’t: Then I’ve successfully intimidated them into trying that “involuntary” bullshit on some other poor sap.
If they try to drag me off the plane: Well, they can’t exactly say I didn’t warn them.
He also included a picture of a t-shirt with this on it.
I actually read my ticket contract.
I have David Dao’s lawyer on speed dial.
Go ahead and bump me. I dare you
So, is there anything to this as a means of keeping from being bumped? Should I be carrying a contract copy around with me when I fly? Who is David Dao? Is the OP as full of shit as he sounds?
There’s an extensive explanation here, too much to quote:
It’s perfectly legal for them to do it so long as they have some kind of fair non-discriminatory procedure for selection. In most cases you’d be denied boarding, in which I don’t think pointing at your t-shirt or producing a contract is going to get you very far. In the rare situation where they are asking you to leave the plane after boarding, they are still legally entitled to do so. Insisting that you are not going to go down easy and they will have to physically drag you off the plane might give them pause, or they might call your bluff and you could find yourself facing criminal charges.
United apologized and changed their policies not because they were contractually obligated to, but because the video went viral, people bandwagoned and shamed United into change. Nobody likes being overbooked and removed from a flight, so they took the opportunity to protest what until then was SOP for the airlines. I think it’s still SOP, really, but now they won’t get TSA involved or some such if a passenger refuses to comply.
So TLDR, overbooking has happened forever, some passengers complain and whine, most get bumped anyway. But if you happen to resist and get recorded and successfully play the victim, well, you get fame and fortune and United looks bad. But it’s all right there in the contract. shrug
In the real world, they will first look for volunteers to disembark because that’s cheaper than the mandatory compensation for involuntarily bumped passengers. They may have to increase from their first offer for volunteers (once I was on a Thanksgiving flight on which the offers got really tempting, though I don’t remember details) but usually can get someone to volunteer.
If I were flying in Canada, the first thing I would do is to threaten to phone my friend Gabor Lucacs (see Gábor Lukács | Air Passenger Rights) who has spent much of his life terrorizing airlines, especially Air Canada. And he actually is a friend, although not a close one. He is a mathematician originally from Hungary who loves a good fight.
Incidentally, I once overheard a gate agent telling a would-be passenger that when they overbook, they deny boarding according to the fare you paid. The higher you paid, the less likely to get bumped.
I hold a PhD. The only time I ever use the title Dr. is when booking flights. I was told, but have no other evidence, that the airlines are reluctant to bump doctors as they may be travelling to treat someone.
I’ve never been bumped, but I have no idea if that is why. I do not fly often. I have been on flights where they asked for volunteers.
Nice strategic thinking, Oldguy. I wonder if they check for truthiness when I book a flight. If not, there’s nothing preventing me from trying the same gambit.
(It might get a little dicey if an actual medical emergency arises mid-flight, but the tension of takeoffs and landings only lasts for a couple of minutes each. This way, I could be on edge for the entire flight, hoping nobody has a heart attack or starts giving birth. Exhilarating!)
In my experience, when there is a medical emergency, they make an inflight announcement asking for medical staff to volunteer to assist, rather than going through the manifest looking for names with Dr in front of them.
If a medical emergency arose when I was flying, and I was asked, I’d simply say I was a PhD not a medical doctor. There is nothing wrong with titling yourself Doctor if you hold a PhD. In fact PhDs were the original doctors. The degree is quite a bit older than the MD.
That’s a good point. I think I’ll stick to my current strategy of boarding the plane dressed up like Snoopy, in his WWI flying ace outfit, so they’ll know there’s someone to call on if the plane gets attacked by the Red Baron…
I believe the Dept of Transportation (not the airline) changed their policy to say that a passenger could not be removed once boarded.
Before you board, anyone is fair game depending on what the local country’s compensation policy is. Be careful how you argue. Interfering with flight crew is legally risky. (I saw a fellow pulled off a plane after it had left the gate after he interrupted the safety talk twice to complain he should have been allowed to move up to first class, not the lady who got it)
I remember once (at the gate, before boarding started) the airline asked for volunteers to give up their seats. I approached the gate and said (at 6AM) “We aren’t in a hurry, if you can get us into New York before 10PM that’s fine by us.” Our stopover in Toronto, but we didn’t care what route they came up with, there were multiple options. They could not; that says something about chances for rescheduling a bumped flight.
The department secretaries at one university liked to do this for us.
The only time it might have helped is when our flight got routed to another airport and the airline gave two of us a free rent-a-car to get home that night.
I then adopted it as a general rule for such situations on my own.
Just as a point of clarification – passengers getting bumped involuntarily due to overbooking is extremely rare. In those cases the airline almost always is able to find people willing to volunteer. As I understand it the most common reason for passengers being involuntarily denied boarding is a last minute change of aircraft. Like for example, a 767 has a mechanical problem, and the airline doesn’t have another 767 available. The best they can come up with is a 737. But all the passengers won’t fit on the much smaller 737, so 20 people will need to be bumped. Obviously finding 20 volunteers is a pretty tall order, so most of those will be involuntary, but it’s preferable to outright canceling the flight.
The Dr. Dao incident was a pretty unusual case, since they didn’t ask for volunteers until after the flight had boarded. A quirk of human psychology is that once we have something in out possession we’re much less likely to want to give it up. Had that asked before they boarded it’s very likely someone would have volunteered.
Upthread someone linked to the Department of Transportation rules for bumping passengers and it said that if the bumping is due to a change in aircraft, the airline does not have to offer compensation to the bumped passengers. And as for the Dr. Dao incident, there were many things wrong with the way that the airline handled that, not just that they waited until after the flight had boarded.
Arguing with the airline desk staff when they screwed up my reservation once (100% their fault) is the one time of my life I ever tried the “actually, it’s Dr. Squidfood” when they called me “Mr. Squidfood”. It didn’t win me any points but it made me fee good for a second.
