American Airlines Bans Involuntary Bumping, Now Depending Solely on Bribes

I am sorry, but is this too simplistic?

Last in first out. The airline knows how many seats are actually available when they sell the tickets. If the plane is full, then tickets after that point should be sold with the provision that the trip is available only if prior sold tickets cancel. Is this any different than buying a theater, music, or sports ticket? And the seating chart shows what tickets re still available. Fare, uh, fair is fair.

YES!!! to more instances of this.

https://www.wzzm13.com/video/news/local/delta-air-lines-reportedly-offered-10000-to-passengers-in-grand-rapids-to-be-bumped-from-flight/69-6cd766f6-b575-47b8-9c42-7ffd04f1ac01

We will see. It really depends more on how they change their booking practices, going from overselling flights, to essentially putting the oversells into a standby mode.

If they change nothing with booking, then they can still have issues. The new policy basically states that if oversold, offers are made for volunteers, if no volunteers, then delay, offer more, if no volunteers, then delay, etc, I suppose at some point you would cancel the flight if there are just a bunch of determined, stubborn, people who won't blink or can be bought?

If someone doesn't show up or cancels at the last minute, doesn't the airline already keep the money they paid for their seat? Isn't overbooking just an attempt to collect money from two people for the same seat?

Why the delay before offering more to the bumped passengers?

Have an auction where the price keeps increasing until there are takers.

Thanks acraven for the heads up. If cash, $10,000 noted by Toby would pay for my Europe trip! Might be worth considering but only for cash.

Honestly this is "much ado about nothing"

Airlines have overbooked forever. Involuntary bumping happens VERY rarely and in spite of how this seems to sound the reason is that it's generally cheaper for the airline to give you the "voucher" (And yes I have been delayed on American while they begged for volunteers) Involuntary bump on a US domestic with more than a 2 hour delay is 400% of your airfare up to $2,150. So they don't want to pay that when people will start jumping at $50 (Yes I have seen people take several hour delays for $50... Sorry but IMHO that's a stupid move) They also to have to give you real cash for involuntary as opposed to AA credits :)

I once got about $2,000 from AA just by bumping from one flight to another all day :)

My United flight a couple of months ago started at $700 and quickly went to $1100 ! Unfortunately I needed to be on that flight @%&!

Delta at least has cash cards at the gate ready to be loaded with funds for people who give up their seats.

Delta has become very good at managing overbooking. I feel like I haven't been on a flight asking for volunteers to give up seats in a decade or so, and I fly a fair amount. Delta has also been very aggressive with respect to avoiding involuntary bumps for a long time.