Overbooked seats: it’s a bad way for airlines to do business

18 Apr 2017 18:18:09

theguardian.com

Simon Jenkins thinks that airlines overbook because “careless passengers often fail to show up” (Our target-driven corporate culture is failing customers, 13 April). Tosh. Do theatres book seats twice because sometimes people don’t show up? Does London’s Festival Hall sell 110% of its tickets? Airlines rely on selling more seats than they really have, just as they rely on many other devices to wring more money from passengers, because their business model is wrong. Flying costs more than the customer is charged.

The “cheap” seat is misleading, and will become ever more so when airlines are forced to pay for the extraordinary damage they are doing to the environment, in terms of both air and noise pollution. Careless passengers? Oops, I forgot my flight from London to Malaga today. Maybe throwing away €150 or more is careless in Jenkins’s world, but in mine it’s not.

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