[cookiecaper]

There are some counter-intuitive effects of the "common sense" approach. If people know that resisting longer will get them more, they will work to delay the process in an effort to maximize the airline's bid. This will impact schedules and ultimately lead to more hostile deplaning situations as people attempt to hold out for more.

Managers/overseers could intentionally place belligerent people on the plane who refuse to get up for less than $x000, use their authorization to grant the override, and then split the money with the passenger. In practice, the DoT minimum mandate could work as a soft ceiling, but managers may say that they negotiated past it to prevent a hostile situation with bad press like this one.

Consider that most passengers are paying +/- $125 for each flight (a direct round trip is 2 flights, connecting round trip 4 flights, a complete itinerary will usually be in the $300-$500 range depending on the details). Even at $200 the vouchers cost them money. It can have an impact if they start paying out $10k per flight in bumped passenger compensation.

You can argue that they shouldn't oversell, but then they're carrying empty seats from people who miss the flight, which is also a waste of money. Since they're already paying ~4x as much as the customer paid them with an $800 voucher, there's plenty of incentive to fine-tune the overselling algorithm just right and limit the necessity of passenger bumps.

I'm not necessarily saying this approach is worse than their current approach, but I just want to point out that it's not as simple as engaging in an open auction over the seats.

[ubernostrum]

All of your arguments are based on the assumption that an over-capacity situation which is only discovered after boarding is common and easy to manufacture.

Also, remember that the compensation for voluntarily yielding one's seat can be "paid" in non-transferable flight vouchers. Airlines don't issue cash for that, and airline employees already have free-travel privileges. To get the right to cash compensation you need to be involuntarily denied boarding, and IDB "pecking order" is not under the control of the agent at the gate.

[Asooka]

You should optimize and design the system so it works the service of the 90% good-natured, cooperative people, then work to minimize the effect of the bad apples when they occur.