In case you missed it, we had a post yesterday about a United passenger being forcibly removed from a flight. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at your rights when it comes to being on an over booked flight and being bumped.
Contents
The Rules
The U.S. Department of Transport has clear guidelines when it comes to overbooking:
- Airlines must first seek volunteers that are willing to be “bumped” from their overbook flight. DOT has not mandated any minimums when it comes to be voluntary bumped.
- If a customer is involuntary bumped there is strict rules in place:
- They must provide you with a written statement describing your rights and also explaining how the carrier decides who gets on an oversold flight and who doesn’t
- Compensation is as follows:
- If you are bumped involuntarily and the airline arranges substitute transportation that is scheduled to get you to your final destination (including later connections) within one hour of your original scheduled arrival time, there is no compensation.
- If the airline arranges substitute transportation that is scheduled to arrive at your destination between one and two hours after your original arrival time (between one and four hours on international flights), the airline must pay you an amount equal to 200% of your one-way fare to your final destination that day, with a $675 maximum.
- If the substitute transportation is scheduled to get you to your destination more than two hours later (four hours internationally), or if the airline does not make any substitute travel arrangements for you, the compensation doubles (400% of your one-way fare, $1350 maximum).
- If your ticket does not show a fare (for example, a frequent-flyer award ticket or a ticket issued by a consolidator), your denied boarding compensation is based on the lowest cash, check or credit card payment charged for a ticket in the same class of service (e.g., coach, first class) on that flight.
- You always get to keep your original ticket and use it on another flight. If you choose to make your own arrangements, you can request an “involuntary refund” for the ticket for the flight you were bumped from. The denied boarding compensation is essentially a payment for your inconvenience.
- If you paid for optional services on your original flight (e.g., seat selection, checked baggage) and you did not receive those services on your substitute flight or were required to pay a second time, the airline that bumped you must refund those payments to you.
Keep in mind airlines can offer you payment in vouchers, if you were involuntary bumped you can request this as cash instead (well, a check at the very least). If you volunteer to be bumped, make sure you clearly understand any and all vouchers the airlines offer you including restrictions and amounts. For example, if they offer you $550 in vouchers, is that a single voucher that is $550 off any flight? Or 11 $50 vouchers off a single flight, limit of one coupon per booking, non peak times only?
Rates Of “Denied” Boarding
Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides some amazing statistics when it comes to “denied boarding” or being bumped. They are categorized into two groups: voluntary and involuntary.
| Table 1-64: Passengers Boarded and Denied Boarding by the Largest U.S. Air Carriersa (Thousands of passengers) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | |
| Boarded | 420696 | 429190 | 445271 | 449184 | 457286 | 460277 | 480555 | 502960 | 514170 | 523081 | 543344 | 477970 | 467205 | 485797 | 522308 | 516553 | 552445 | 567740 | 576476 | 548041 | 595253 | 591825 | 600774 | 599405 | 535551 | 613141 |
| Denied boarding,b total | 628 | 646 | 764 | 683 | 824 | 842 | 957 | 1071 | 1136 | 1070 | 1120 | 900 | 837 | 769 | 747 | 597 | 674 | 685 | 684 | 719 | 746 | 626 | 598 | 494 | 467 | 552 |
| Voluntary | 561 | 599 | 718 | 632 | 771 | 794 | 899 | 1018 | 1091 | 1024 | 1062 | 861 | 803 | 727 | 702 | 552 | 619 | 621 | 620 | 651 | 681 | 578 | 539 | 440 | 418 | 505 |
| Involuntary | 67 | 47 | 46 | 51 | 53 | 49 | 58 | 54 | 45 | 46 | 57 | 39 | 34 | 42 | 45 | 45 | 55 | 64 | 64 | 67 | 65 | 48 | 59 | 54 | 49 | 46 |
| Percent denied boarding | 0.15 | 0.15 | 0.17 | 0.15 | 0.18 | 0.18 | 0.2 | 0.21 | 0.22 | 0.2 | 0.21 | 0.19 | 0.18 | 0.16 | 0.14 | 0.12 | 0.12 | 0.12 | 0.12 | 0.13 | 0.13 | 0.11 | 0.1 | 0.08 | 0.09 | 0.09 |
The chance of you being denied boarding is relatively low (0.09). It seems that voluntary bumping has been somewhat decreasing, but the ratio of involuntary to voluntary bumping has been increasing.
How Much Does Overbooking Save Airlines & Customers?
Economist James Heins says that $100 billion has been injected into the U.S. economy due to overbooking and being able to offer customers compensation for being bumped from a flight over the last thirty years. I’d take that number with a heavy grain of salt as no specifics are given on how that number was calculated and I was unable to find any peer reviewed research that backs up this claim.
Our Verdict
Airlines obviously make more money from overbooking than they do from paying voluntary and involuntary compensation for bumping customers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable expectation for a customer to expect to have a seat on aircraft that they have paid for (unless a change of aircraft is required or other operational reasons).
The easiest solution would be to increase the amount airlines need to pay if they involuntary bump passengers, this provides them with more incentive to find (and compensate) volunteers. Involuntary bumps should be an absolute worst case scenario, as they are bad for everybody involved. Considering that in the last three years we have data for that 11%+ of passengers being bumped are involuntary suggests to me that more can be done by airlines.
Delta for example seemingly overbooks like crazy (or has other issues), but has relatively few involuntary denied boarding.
As a general rule, if I have no time constraints, I alert airline staff that In am willing to be bumped if deemed necessary. If I get bumped on Delta, they would normally give me a $400 airline voucher. I plan to get bumped as often as possible so that I can save my vouchers for a rainy day.
I think a defination of overbooking
would be necessary. Did the last four person who took the flight actually “Book” the flight? If so, where are tickets? If not, where is the “Overbooking” coming from?
Another way to solve the issue is to ban involuntary bump.
Make airlines increase the offer until there are enough volunteers.
The silver lining to this incident going viral is that it’s become clear that United has been breaking the law. Airlines are allowed to deny boarding in overbooking situations, so they’ve been dressing up situations as overbookings in order to exercise that right. It does NOT count as overbooking to fully book an aircraft and then replace paying customers with staff. The statute that gives them the right to overbook is actually about “oversales”, and it specifically commands airlines to give preference to people with “reserved confirmed seats.” (United’s own Contract of Carriage specifies that United employees won’t be compensated for denied boarding because they don’t have reserved confirmed seats.)
On top of that abuse, they’ve been treating kicking passengers off aircrafts as if they were simply denying boarding. The statute strictly gives them the right to deny passengers to board the aircraft. Once their boarding passes are scanned and accepted, it’s a completely different matter. Even United’s contract of carriage makes the difference clear when talking about their right to remove service animals from the plane. They specifically say that the animals which can’t be contained “will be denied boarding or removed from the flight.” United distinguishes the two actions, and reserves the right to do both.
But of course, United is disguising this incident as a “denial of boarding” because it’s the only way they can make it legal. It’s not– and until a court puts a stop to it, they will continue removing passengers from flights for non-overbooking situations, and call it a “denial of boarding.”
http://www.untied.com/main.shtml
an interesting website against UA for 20 years.
I have about 13k United points I am going to use to book a hotel. Since I don’t have premier status they won’t even let me purchase gift cards with them, or transfer to hotel points. I don’t choose to fly with them again after this debacle.
Kudos to you Terri. I know most readers on this board would instead try to “maximize” their miles, add a few more to top out, etc. Very few would “waste” them (myself included!) on booking a hotel. With that said, I wish more people would take a stand against an airline’s policies and business practices rather than “sell out” and continue to fly them because of their miles, airline status, etc.
I personally stopped flying United 3 years ago because of their awful customer service and while at times it is more inconvenient, it feels so good walking past their gates towards an airline that seems to actually care about their customers or, more importantly, not run by tone-deaf management. They have made one bad decision after another for years now, it will be interesting to see the eventual ramifications for what happened Sunday night.
Will, thanks again for the initial post yesterday on this subject. It has been an interesting discussion to follow.
It is curious that United bumped two couples to make room for the 4 seats. I assume that approach costs the airline less to accommodate than bumping 4 individuals?
Most likely, it’s an overnight delay so they are on the hook for the hotel as well.
I wonder what does “later connections” mean here. Does it just include connections in the same reservation, or include connections in other reservations as well (flight segments in 2 different tickets)?
Well, it was just a matter of time. There is a new fare class/fee that guarantees you won’t be beaten when you are bumped. You may still be bumped, just not beaten.
Good out of the box thinking united.
pretty sure obeying a law enforcement officers directive will save you the beating. Maybe not but my bet in on it
Do passengers of canceled flights fall under the “involuntarily denied boarding” category?
The reason I’m asking is, I was told Jetblue as a policy never overbook but the last table in the article shows high %age of involuntarily denied boarding. Wondering what would the cause apart from change of flights?
Change of planes from the A321 to a smaller Boeing.
+1
I am not an expert, but I’d think that managing a ‘bunch of checkbooks’ in a distributed network like this seems nearly impossible and probably have a 5% fraud rate. Doesn’t have any company with > 10 employees and centralized check management, where checks are approved and printed by a centralized, heavily monitored system?
I think airlines simply prefer vouchers, because it’s significantly cheaper: you can’t take this money to another airline, you need to come back to the same airline and probably even spend more money. In many cases, it’s probably money that you wouldn’t have spent with this airline or maybe even for air travel. A certain percentage of vouchers probably just expires unused. In that regard, I think an airline voucher is not much different from a $10 off coupon at 1800-flowers.
hmm, posted my old comment here again. not sure how that happend.