Originally Posted by
Half wing
True. This is a slippery slope. As soon as we start offering money for an oversold flight, people are going to take full advantage of this. This quickly becomes a big money loser for us.
Perhaps someone should put forth legislation that prevents all airlines from over booking. It would be a level playing field, all airlines just charge more to compensate for the losses of not over booking. As an exception to the law, PS could be added after the flight is sold-out, up to a certain percentage. In this scenario we could then legally offer people money to take a later flight. Just thinking out load, I'm sure there is some reason this can't work.
Don't think out load; it's a half baked idea. What this industry doesn't need is more government interference.
Overbooking was a profitable strategy in the past. Delta's decision to raise maximum DB compensation is going to make it unprofitable because every dirtbag in the US will now be looking for $10k to give up their seat.
The problem is the demand is exceeding supply. We can add capacity, raise prices, or do both. I'm in favor of doing both. We don't even need to 'raise' ticket prices; all we need to do is change the number of seats available in each fare bucket. We shouldn't even be selling tickets in the G, K, or L fare buckets right now.