It could be a scene from an auction house: A Delta flight from Boston to Rome in September was so overbooked that a flight attendant begged passengers and offered them thousands of dollars and a hotel room to give up their seats in exchange for a voucher and a later flight.
“Come on guys, $3,500, can someone get one for the team?” said the flight attendant in a video captured on TikTok. “We’ll get you a hotel if you show up to us.”
According to the account that posted the video, 13 passengers received between $2,000 and $4,000 to voluntarily surrender their tickets and end up in Rome on a later flight a few hours later.
It’s not just a lucky few who take advantage of the airline’s overlapping flight vouchers. From January to March 2024, 23,699 Delta passengers have volunteered to “take one for the team” in exchange for coupons and travel benefits. A common practice to ensure full flights, airlines often overbook passengers at the risk of moving them and managing inconveniences. Under rules from the Department of Transportation (DOT), airlines must compensate passengers 200% of the cost of a one-way ticket for a flight delayed up to two hours and 400% for a flight delayed more than that – a amount that can reach up to 1550 dollars. Airlines must provide compensation to passengers on the same day as the crash incident.
But amid post-pandemic revenge travel and labor shortages that have delayed and canceled a record number of flights, airlines have been willing to pay more perks to keep travelers from overbooking, everything from pizza slices to passengers up to $10,000 in cash late. As the airline industry records record travel days in the July heat, airline passengers are looking for good deals – and the secret is how the airlines will get them.
“My job as a content creator is to share hacks that people really like,” said full-time financial content creator Sam Jarman. wealth. “I have to listen to my audience, and my audience loves anything related to flying, tips, hacks.”
Taking flights was a boon for Jarman in his pre-child years. Getting paid to wait a few hours was a tough one for him, and he believes that the next generation of Gen Z and millennial travelers – who are looking for experiences over luxury goods – are good candidates to take advantage of the travel benefits that reserve an oversell. flight can offer.
“Getting a flight voucher is almost like getting cash compensation, in my mind,” Jarman said.
Airlines are booked, busy and bruised
Getting kicked off a flight wasn’t always considered an airline benefit. Before social media became an accepted educational tool for financial literacy, it was a tool to document airline nightmares. In 2017, a United Airlines passenger was dragged off an overbooked flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. Multiple passengers captured the scene of a security officer grabbing the passenger – who had a tangled shirt and crooked glasses as he was dragged down the plane’s aisle – on cellphone cameras and posted the video on Twitter.
“It felt like something the world needed to see,” said Tyler Bridges, one of the passengers who documented the scene on camera. New York Times.
When airlines can’t sweeten the pot enough with vouchers and perks to voluntarily lure passengers off overlapping flights, they rarely have to resort to involuntarily removing passengers from full flights, a move that was all the more controversial for special flight because United was looking for extra seats for its employees, Bridges said. United spokesman Charlie Hobart responded at the time that the airline had asked the passenger several times to politely leave the plane, but he refused.
The incident was a turning point not just for United — which apologized for the “disturbing incident” and overbooking the flight — but the entire industry, according to Clint Henderson, managing editor of the travel blog and newspaper. The points guy.
“Airlines dramatically escalated the amount they were willing to pay passengers to volunteer to take a later flight,” Henderson said. wealth. “You’ve had this arms race because the airlines didn’t want to get into a situation where they had to force people off the plane.”
Indeed, the airlines made almost immediate changes, with Delta increasing their compensation for overlapping flights to almost $10,000. American Airlines updated its Terms of Carriage to prohibit the airline from removing a paying passenger who has already boarded an oversold flight. United implemented a policy requiring flight crew to check in one hour before flights to avoid having to move passengers in the event of overbooked flights.
Even the DOT stepped in, strengthening its denied-boarding compensation rule in 2021 to prohibit airlines from denying boarding to a passenger or involuntarily bumping them if they checked into a flight before the deadline. control, as well as clarifying that the listed requirements for financial compensation are a minimum, not a maximum.
As a result of the changes, United “significantly reduced the annual number [involuntary denied boardings] since 2017,” said Hobart wealth.
First class reputation
The 2017 United incident may be a distant memory for an aviation industry that has continued to grapple with controversy, but the way airlines navigate compensation for overlapping flights is a microcosm of the often tenuous relationship between passengers and industry giants.
“It’s always been a push and pull between airlines and consumers,” Henderson said. “I think this is a continuation of that.”
Between shrinking seat sizes and spoiled food, commercial flights have lost their luster in the eyes of travelers. As airlines try to sweeten the pot for travelers with more generous vouchers and perks like expensive massage parlors and steak tartare, angry customers will still do what they can to get a leg up on the airlines they feel are screwing them over. , Henderson argued. It’s an understandable sentiment from passengers, but it’s also not good news for the industry as a whole.
“Airlines aren’t always the good guys, so I don’t want to make it sound like that,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s not the most profitable business in the world.”
Despite record numbers of trips, airlines have yet to see more travelers translate into more profits. Boeing jet delivery delays, inflation, labor shortages and poor expansion strategies have all hurt the industry’s bottom line. The bleak outlook for the industry has Henderson concerned about trends in TikTok and sharing hacks that could allow many travelers to take advantage of overbooking rules.
But the airlines have not found this problem. The number of passengers denied boarding due to overbooking actually decreased, by 0.27 passengers per 10,000 from January to March, due to an overbooked flight on the 10 largest US commercial airlines. That compares to 0.29 passengers per 10,000 in the same period in 2023 and 0.32 passengers per 10,000 in 2022, according to DOT’s Air Travel Consumer Reports.
Furthermore, the number of bumped passengers does not fluctuate based on consumer demand or passengers hoping to make money by deliberately overbooking a flight. The amount of tickets an airline offers for an overbooked flight is based on its predictions of how many people might not show up for a flight — and its need to make a profit.
Ultimately, Henderson believes that compensation for overlapping flights, regardless of their frequency, is just another way for airline passengers to try to tip the scales of airline economics in their favor, especially when they’re feeling down. from industry giants.
“It’s getting harder to maximize your battle against the airline,” he said.