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Southwest Airlines Vowed Not to Overbook Flights. What It's Doing Now Is Far Worse
The company's policies provide a vital lesson about how not to treat your customers if you want to hold on to them. Airlines are struggling to stay afloat, even as air travel soars. They're doing whatever they can to maximize revenue with every flight. Many are going to one of the oldest tricks in the book: Overbooking flights. It's a gamble that generally pays off. But when it doesn't, Southwest Airlines upholds its title as America's least reliable airline while also… (www.msn.com) More...
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I have flown Southwest a lot in the past year, and had one cancelled flight but never a downgrade of an -800 to a -700. I am not sure whether the article makes it a much bigger problem than it actually is...
"Airlines are struggling to stay afloat"... knew the article wasn't worth reading after the second sentence.
Are there really that many people out there who miss their confirmed flights on a daily basis? Like seriously? 30% of seats on average? Just think about that for a second… if each major airline flight had a 30% over-booking for no-shows, for every single flight, that is an amazing amount of irresponsible or incompetent people who book flights! Who is the problem here? Southwest for trying to cover their butt or customers who can’t seem to catch their flights on time?
The airlines have historic records that show which flights get no-showed the most and based on that info they overbook those particular flights, generally by the no- show percentage. I used to see certain flights that never went out empty and nobody was left behind however, I also witnessed many flights that showed full the night before and left with 30 open seats in the morning. They were typically destinations the airline served 3 or 4 flight times a day. Other issues like weather or mechanical breakdowns affect the daily schedules with a knock on effect which is why travel in the early usually is the best. And yes, if you watch any airline operation long enough you would be amazed at how many rude, inconsiderate, self centered immature travellers are present every single day. There were happier times but it seems people are just angry at everything these days.
I flew a SWA flight a few weeks ago that was oversold so they asked for a couple volunteers to bump off. They offered another later flight PLUS $1500. You should have seen the crowd scramble to the gate desk upon that announcement.
This.”aviation writer” is truly a keyboard warrior who has it out for Southwest. She does continue to fly them. Slow news day so she resorted to click bait and very slanted writing.
