Getting Bumped Off A Plane

[chokkie]

Hi AB travellers out there ... please excuse this very thick question, but I am at a loss to understand why an airline (Air France) bump people off planes. My husband was due to fly out of Marseille yesterday, change at Paris and get an onward connection to Birmingham. When he checked in at Marseille, he was told that the plane had been overbooked so they were putting my OH on standby. Thankfully, they managed to find him a flight from Marseille to Amsterdam to Birmingham, all via KLM (a much nicer airline than AF, in our opinion). What I fail to understand is - my husband paid for his seat on both planes, and there are only a finite number of seats on a plane - so why does AF overbook? If they do this then they have to bump people off and go to the trouble of possibly finding overnight accommodation for the bumpees and/or find them alternative flights. I know that my hubby had checked in because I did this for him when I checked him in for his two outward flights ... it's all a mystery to me, and I would love to be enlightened as to why they do this. I doubt we will ever fly Air France again - they are just rubbish! Many thanks, cheers, Chox.

[Ellipsis]

If say you have to fly from London to LA on a Monday and back two days later on the Wednesday, this would be mega-expensive even in economy. So what people do is buy a return from London to LA where the return is several months away, and a second return from LA to London two days later. This works out to be the cheapest way of doing it - but two tickets are discarded in the process. That's one reason for no-shows and overbooking.

[237SJ]

I was trying to get back from the Middle East one time (coming up from Sri Lanka) on a stand by ticket and my flight looked fine. KLM massively overbooked though and all of their passengers turned up so they were put on my aircraft and we were left behind. Took us 24 hours to get home. Not the best result.

[EDDIE51]

237 ,yes it was back in the 1970s. 1st and ONLY time on Air France. Australia's Qantas was my favorite airline. ALL Qantas aircraft are 'Long Haul' specification. Which means Better / Wider seats with more leg room . (plus unlimited free drinks on all flights) I always ordered Champagne .

[237SJ]

Actually, Qantas are one of the airlines that will go with empty seats in Business whilst leaving people behind.

[TonyV]

Eddie got champagne even before taking of

[237SJ]

And then their staff get on my aircraft and ask for an upgrade....I don't think so

[Old_Geezer]

They do it because they can, because they don't care, because nothing holds them to account.

[237SJ]

The CAA and nowadays EASA holds them to account

[Old_Geezer]

Then why is it still happening ?

[jno]

same thing happened to me as to SharonA - except the next flight was in 4 hours, not 4 days. $300 for sitting in Heathrow for four hours isn't bad. Had to get the money at their NYC office, though.

[Buenchico]

Eddie's incorrect in saying that 'all' airlines do it.

Budget carriers (such as easyJet, Ryanair, etc) don't do it because their fare rules mean that 'no show' passengers don't get a refund. (The only time that a passenger should be denied a seat on a budget airline is when they've been forced to replace a large aircraft with a smaller one).

'Full fare' carriers though offer refunds to 'no show' passengers (or, at least, to those passengers who've paid the higher fares that offer such refunds), so that they book more passengers onto a flight than there are seats on the plane in order to try to end up with a full flight of fare-paying passengers after some people have dropped out. If everybody actually turns up they're then forced to 'bump' some travellers.

So, despite all the moans about budget carriers, you're often better off booking with them (rather than with full fare carriers) because you don't face the risk of being 'bumped'.

[cassa333]

They always overbook to account for no shows.

[gollob]

I had 4 tickets to see the Harry Hill show at the Twickenham TV studios. We got to Richmond station as so as not to be late had a taxi to Twickenham as it was a 18.30 booking in time.We arrived at 18.15 so were in plenty of time. When we got to go in we were told it was fully booked So 4 of us had made a 240 mile round journey for nothing. Even worse were a couple behind us had come from Leeds. Talk about using people

[Buenchico]

Gollob:
That's the problem with free tickets. If people have paid £100+ for non-refundable West End theatre tickets they're likely to do their very best to ensure that they attend. However people who've got free tickets for a TV show are less likely to bother about attending if it becomes inconvenient for them. So (because TV companies don't want any seats when the cameras pan to the audience), shows are substantially overbooked. (It's hard to get exact figures but I've seen it suggested that for a show with 250 seats the absolute minimum number of tickets sent out is 500 but it can often be considerably more than that).

To be fair to the organisations sending out tickets, they do always make it clear on their websites that admission isn't guaranteed. e.g.
https://www.applausestore.com/faqs
and
https://lostintv.com/faqs