Involuntary bumps are more likely to happen if the flight was generally either very inexpensive or very expensive.
The required compensation is 4x the price of your ticket up to a max of $1350. So if tickets were generally either very cheap or very expensive, then the cost to passengers might reasonably be higher than the airline has to pay, so there won’t be a lot of volunteers.
I have been on a flight where they were offering $1350 in cash to people to get bumped for a day. I regret that I did not move fast enough. We would have lost a day of our vacation but also the bump would have basically paid for the whole thing.
I also volunteered to be bumped from a flight where there were two additional non-voluntary bumps, one of whom was very very mad about it and yelled at the airline employee a lot. Afterward, I spoke to her, was kind and polite, and asked if it was possible to get a first class upgrade for my bump. And it was. Be nice! You will not get anything by yelling at the desk attendant and demanding your rights.
The easiest way to avoid being bumped is to establish very high frequent flyer status with the airline you are traveling on. They don’t bump customers who pay them a lot.
“Easiest”??? So I have to fly dozens of times per year for no reason just to avoid being bumped for the once every two or three years times I fly for a purpose?
As I recall, the Dr. Dao situation was particularly galling because they wanted him removed to fly some flight crew employees to another location. that may have seemed a priority to the company, but the rest of the world didn’t see it that employees get a free flight and someone gets tossed off.
Plus, they airline took a page from the police blotter handbook - smear the victim to make excessive force seem OK. As I recall, they claimed he wasn’t a good doctor, had been disciplined for overprescribing restricted drugs or something - oops, wrong Dr. Dao.
If you have to decide between two customers who do you inconvenience. The customer who uses your service monthly, or the one who uses you every few years. If it was your decision as a manager/business owner who would you pick?
There were lots of ways that United Airlines screwed up in the Dr Dao forcible removal situation; they first offered cash for volunteers to deplane, but stopped the offers at $800 and switched to forced bumping, and they had three people who agreed to disembark but not him. Not sure why they insisted that he and only he had to disembark. And if you read the Wikipedia article, it describes the crappy, belligerent attitude of the United supervisor.
Every airline I’m aware of, once they get down to passengers at the same fare/loyalty status rank, chooses who will get bumped by when they checked in. They’re not (currently anyway) going into the granularity of individual miles traveled or anything.
So the easiest way to not get bumped is to set an alarm for 24 hours before your flight and go online and check in. There will be lots of people who check in later than you and will get bumped before you.
Not for no reason, I fly overseas approximately 5-6 times per year, and domestically about a dozen or more times a year for work and personal travel. There’s a perk for being a regular customer. One of those is not having a fear of getting bumped.
The link to DOT rules just uses the phrase “denied boarding” which suggests you are prevented from boarding. Once you have boarded, they have missed their opportunity to deny boarding, and now it is forced disembarkation, kind of a different thing. Where does it state that they can force you out once you have been allowed to board, for overbooking reasons?
You may be right, but does anyone have a clear cite that DOT make this distinction?
It’s not clear from the DOT regs I linked in post #2. The article title uses the colloquial term “bumping”, which it defines as voluntarily or involuntarily giving up your seat, which it then says is also known as denied boarding. It’s not clear that “denied boarding” is the primary technical term, or if the definition excludes asking you to leave your seat after you have boarded.
I think his point is that doing a bunch of flying in order to achieve a high status is only practical for people who do a lot of travel already. If you don’t, then it seems like one of the hardest and most expensive ways to avoid being bumped. I can think of an easier way to avoid being bumped, travel at times when the flights are less likely to be full, that is far easier than attaining high status.
What you linked to aren’t the regs but rather a plain-English explanation of them. Reply linked to the regs in post #14. The regulations themselves repeatedly refer to a person who is “denied boarding,” but the regulations don’t define “denied boarding.” Ordinarily, when construing an undefined term in a regulation, you go with the plain language meaning of the rule. I’m not looking to see whether the Department of Transportation has clarified whether a person who is removed from a plane after boarding has been “denied boarding” within the meaning of the rules but there are articles on the web that suggest being pulled from a plane you are already seated on is not, in fact, the same as being “denied boarding.”
Of course I agree with the plain English meaning, but it leaves open the possibility that we just haven’t found the regulatory definition. After the Dao case, it would be odd if DOT haven’t unambiguously clarified this point.
I have never been bumped involuntarily, but when I flew United, there were requests for volunteers on over half of all flights. Since I started flying Delta almost exclusively, I’ve never even heard a request for volunteers (I assume that it all takes place behind the scenes with their system).