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by dragontamer
3358 days ago
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Voluntary is a bit harder to compare though. For one, because its not necessarily wrong for people to give up their seat for money. If I were going on a vacation and someone offered me $400 to take a flight 2-hours later, I probably would take the $400. In any case, United is not the worst offender in either voluntary nor involuntary "bumps". |
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I don't think it's wrong per se, in a moral sense. I just think it creates problems. The more overbooked flights you have, the less able you are to respond to delays or to re-seat passengers who got bumped, or to find new flights for people whose plane suddenly got smaller or who missed a connection or whatever, and there are ALWAYS going to be things like that happening.
The passengers who get bumped don't usually just give up altogether. They have to get on some flight. The more overbooked flights there are, the fewer chances there are for them to get on a different flight, and the more people there are looking for different flights in the first place. The problem compounds and you get the cascading spiral like I described above.
A constrained system like the airline is going to respond nonlinearly to perturbations. When you double the number of overbooked flights, the problems they cause aren't just going to get twice as bad, they'll get four times or six times as bad or more. (made up numbers, I'm just saying it's not one-to-one).
Flying is already a stressful experience thanks to the TSA and just the general stress of making sure you get there on time with all the uncertainty in what can go wrong (traffic, long security line, long wait to check a bag, whatever). If I book a flight at a certain time, it's because I want to leave and arrive at the times I chose, not a couple hours later or the next day or two days later, or never. This is why I pretty much refuse to fly United anymore. I don't like the stress of having to wonder if I'm going to be allowed on the flight I've paid for.