How do airlines overbook a flight if there are a limited amount of seats on a plane?
How do airlines overbook a flight if there are a limited amount of seats on a plane?
Simple--they sell more tickets than there are seats.
Statistics show that a certain percentage of passengers will cancel, change their flight, no-show, or miss a connection. If that doesn't happen, they pay volunteers to change their flight and if that doesn't work, they pay non-volunteers to change their flight.
Predicative analytics tells them on that particular flight the likelihood that x number of people will rebook/cancel their flight, leaving them open.
They assume that a certain number will not show up, so they overbook by that number in the hopes of still flying a full plane. When everyone does show up, then they have a problem and must seek out volunteers to give up seats or involuntarily bump passengers.
Hey use an overbooking profile, to determine the number of no shows, they then sell to that level hoping that they are right, of course sometimes they get it wrong and they need to bump people to later flights and offer compensation. Sometimes they will even offer free upgrades to ensure maximum occupancy. Airlines aim for the highest seat factor, more seats filled = bigger profits.
They sell more seats than they have.
Most of those steats are for emergency peoples.
They have years of statistics and know how many people purchase tickets vs how many people actually show up for the flight. They then calculate how many seats they can "oversell" so that they will fly full.
They do that as they lose money when a seat isn't filled. If more ticketed passengers show up than they have seats for, they have already calculated what they can offer in compensation and still make money.
Because they have historical data that shows that people cancel last minute, or don't show up. So they overbook.
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