The EASIEST way is to pay a little more for the flight. Upgrade to “more legroom” or for “early boarding” or something. Yeah, it will cost you more, but they rarely bump people involuntarily, and when they do, they generally start with the people who paid the least among those who have no status with the airline.
That article says that United Airlines is the worst for involuntary bumps and even there, the number of passengers denied boarding is eleven out of every 100,000 passengers. So it’s not something I think anyone needs to worry about.
sure more than one person in 10,000 has to worry about it which works out to about seven people a day on average. Wiki says they fly about 71,000 a day.
That’s just Denver. The entire airline flies over 400,000 people per day.
Fake Moderation
guess I didn’t read well enough
Again: Do you actually think that making a bunch of extra, unneeded flights is in some way “easier”?
Good grief.
While involuntary bumping is fairly uncommon ( I’ve been on lots of flights with bumps but they always found volunteers ), having the entire flight delayed or even canceled is fairly common. Which is why I always try to schedule an extra day around anything important, even if it means arriving a day early.
Bumping really suck psychologically, it feels very personal when everyone else but you gets to go. But the actual inconvenience is no greater than the inconvenience that happens when the flight is completely canceled and there aren’t any tricks to help you there. So if you are a doctor flying to perform an important transplant surgery, I recommend allowing yourself extra time. Even a full day. I had to fly for an important meeting this summer. I booked the flight a day earlier than I needed. There was a line of storms passing through and the airline canceled the flight and told me to come back the next day. I did, and everything worked out.
The one time I go involuntarily bumped was on a flight from ORD. They would not allow me to board and basically didn’t tell me anything at all until the door shut. Then they told me that I was one of the last people to check-in for the flight, so I was one of four people to get bumped. (I had actually checked-in on-line about 12 hours before the flight, so I found it very difficult to believe that I was one of “the last.”) They gave me a voucher for $600, which was about 4 times the cost of that leg of my flight, shuttled me to a hotel, and gave me some vouchers for meals (after all the restaurants had closed). I got home about 14 hours after I expected to.
I wasn’t happy, but I later used the voucher for a trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights.
And who do that travel along routes serviced by a specific airline or alliance. I had a year in which I took about 70 flights but they were with 4 different companies despite having the same origin and final destination; this was due to a combination of when we had to fly and of changes to flight schedules. Mind you, reception desk personnel in a particular hotel very close to one of London’s airports ended up knowing our room preferences by heart.
No one said it was easy, just that of the available options that it was easier than others. You can also buy a first class ticket, that’s also easier but may be just as much of an obstacle. It appears that there’s no “easy” way to avoid being in the class of people that might be bumped unless you’re willing to pay more money, either by upgrading your ticket or establishing high status on the airline.
Again, if there is no other alternative what do you think would an acceptable answer would be?
Move to a location where overbooking is illegal?
I mean, most people would not put that at the top of their list of “reasons to move”, but it makes about as much sense from a practical point of view. And hey, it does work.
But let’s remember that overbooking as a general principle is a good idea for all of us.
Without overbooking, all fares must increase, since most flights would leave partly empty for the no-shows; and more flights would be required to accommodate everyone, burning a significant greater amount of fuel every day - and whatever percentage that would be, it’s a percentage of a very large number, airline travel has a huge carbon footprint. We can’t view sensibly view overbooking as the airlines screwing us. It’s a practical way to give consumers the cheapest possible fares, and it significantly reduces the carbon footprint.
So we can advocate for fairer policies for who gets bumped, but ultimately the tiny number of people who are involuntarily bumped is a small price to pay for the benefit of overbooking as a general principle.
Overbooking is only one reason why you might get bumped, though. There might be an unexpected weight restriction, or a smaller plane, or a broken seat, or urgent employee travel (which IIRC is what precipitated the situation with David Dao).
JetBlue doesn’t overbook, but it has had fairly high rates of bumping at times.
There are usually lots of less expensive ways to move yourself up the list than flying first class, although that certainly works. Buy a refundable ticket. Buy extra space. Buy earlier boarding. All of those (even buying the first class ticket) are easier than doing enough extra flying to earn a top “status” as a frequent flier.
That article is from 2017. JetBlue seems to have addressed that problem. And so has United!
From this article, from “About 15,000 passengers were denied their airplane seats involuntarily over the year ending in April 2018”
Spirit
Frontier
Southwest
Alaska
American:
What no-shows? I don’t think I’ve seen more than 0.1% of those in the years I’ve been traveling under No Overbooking rules.
Unexpected weight restriction. Why?
Smaller plane. Not likely when the airline’s planes are all the same size.
A seat that all of a sudden is broken to the point of unusability. Someone needs to either call the cops on the vandal(s) who broke it or have a Stern Talk with whomever is handling maintenance.
And so forth. You guys have overbooking because your market bears it. We don’t have it, and our market bears the lack of overbooking just fine.
I thought you were in Spain? Overbooking is not prohibited in the EU.
They are not, and how nice for you.
But “have high frequent flyer status” isn’t actionable advice. You either have it because you fly a lot or you don’t. No one’s going to go out there and make extra flights so they won’t get bumped.
“Check in early” is something that anyone can do, and it will materially improve your chances of not being involuntarily bumped, even if it’s your first flight and you’re in steerage class. Because when they bump someone, they start with the group of peons who paid the least and start bumping them based on when they checked in.
And it’s usually pretty easy, too.
How would you know?