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Aviation History
1971
1971 - 0090.PDF
FLIGHT International, 21 January 1971 83 Overbooking . . . the problem that doesn't exist but won't go away By DAVID WOOLLEY IT is A FAIR BET that during the recent holiday period a number of passengers around the world will have arrived at the airport only to be told politely that the seats which they thought they had booked were unfortunately not avaliable. To no avail the "OK" shown in the reserva tion status box on their ticket coupons; the excuses will have been: "We had a party to accommodate, and this was the only flight on which it was possible," or something like that. In some cases the passengers will have been given free meals, and most will no doubt have continued on their way by another flight within a few hours. Protests at missed appointments will have fallen on ears that, if they were not actually deaf, were sympathetic but little else. Only in the USA is the traveller likely to have received much satis faction to his complaints. There the CAB has rules which provide for compensation under certain circumstances. Overbooking, the practice which all scheduled airlines indulge in but which none like to talk about, is of course not just a holiday-season problem or even a year-round problem, but a hardy perennial. That it exists at all, say the carriers, is due entirely to the existence of the passenger who books but doesn't show up—the "no-show" case. If all those who made reservations honoured them, the argument runs, there would be no unnecessarily empty seats flying around the world. Cancelled seats could be resold. With experience an airline can tell within certain limits how many customers for a particular flight are likely to be "no-shows," and can devise a formula for calculating the number of seats which may be overbooked with a reasonable degree of safety (obviously massive overbooking would rebound in terms of bad publicity). lata acknowledges the existence of an overbooking/ no-show problem, and has on occasions in the past urged its members to adopt penalties for passengers who do not honour their reservations. But the association's members have never agreed to the idea, partly because of practical difficulties in implementing it, and also because of the bad publicity they feel it might attract. There are also diffi culties with evolving an international standard plan of action against "no-shows." One measure which lata airlines have already taken to alleviate the "no-show" problem is the requirement to reconfirm bookings for return flights or for onward journeys following stopovers. Reconfirmation becomes necessary after the lapse of certain prescribed time intervals, and lata considers that it would not be practicable to shorten these intervals. It is felt in lata that overbooking quite often results from over-enthusiasm at airlines' sales outlets; the desire to accommodate the customer, presumably, leads the clerk to overstep the mark. Nevertheless it is also admitted that passengers are overbooked, although it is pointed out that the percentage of overbooking is not arrived at haphazardly but is based on careful assessment. There is no suggestion that one airline is better or worse than any other with respect to overbooking (assum ing that you concede that it is an undesirable practice in the first place). Reproduced below is a circular to check-in and transfer-desk staff of BOAC which is indicative of the approach to the problem adopted by just one carrier. It is doubtless typical of staff instructions in a hundred different airlines, although for BOAC the control of over booking is probably an unusually delicate matter, seeing that the corporation is short of capacity and is running
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