How is it that airlines are constantly overbooking flights?

I'd take that $600 deal! In the past four months, I've earned over $850 in travel vouchers from volunteering to get bumped!

But why do they overbook? Crazy as it sounds, there are people who book flights and fail to show up.

Let's say that it's a plane with 30 rows iin coach, and five seats per rowl. That's 150 seats, and let's say they book 160 passengers in coach.

So we've got to free up 10 spaces in coach. Some of them will be frequent fliers and may choose to upgrade to first class (ahem... me), some may miss the connection because their inbound flight was delayed, some may have chosen to wait on standby for an earlier flight where a seat became available, and some may arrive late at the airport or just otherwise choose not to travel that day.

So there's a lot of options for those ten seats to open up. It's a gamble that statistically they take to maximize their revenue.

How to avoid being on the "rusty nail" end of this? Make sure you get a seat assignment and check in as early as you can.

Overbooking is standard procedure. An airline would rather fly a full plane than one with only a few people on it. Airlines always have to figure that there will be some people that miss the flight or will cancel at the last minute. To accomodate for those instances, planes are overbooked. In the rare instance that everyone does show up, the airline is entitled to provide compensation for those willing to give up their seats. If everyone refuses, the airline has the right to deny certain passengers from flying based on specific ticketing rules. For instance, someone flying on a free ticket may be forced to give up a seat.

Business travellers are notorious for cancelling flights at the last minute. When someone cancels, there is a rebooking fee but in most (not all) situations, they can still redeem the ticket less the rebooking fee for another flight. So basically the seat they just gave up is earning no money for the airline. Normally it is not an issue--- the airlines overbook on most flights, and most of the time it works out just fine. This weekend, though, is an exception as there have been so many cancellations and complications, that airlines are scrambling to put people on whatever plane they can, going anywhere remotely close to where the passenger wants to go.

I travel a lot for work and in normal operations I usually see overbooked flights looking for volunteers about once in every 20 trips; over the weekend I saw it on every plane I was on or wanted to get on (and in a couple of cases I was one of the ones with no seat assignment, waiting for someone to no-show so I could ge thteir seat) because the crazy weather in the Northeast cut down the number of planes flying all over the country. Squeeze them in like sardines in that case!

People are correct in saying that there are no shows and that is why airlines overbook. They actually keep a detailed history of the flights in a market and base their overbooking on this history. It is not unusual for an international flight to be overbooked by 100 and go out with empty seats.

Many airlines in the peak seasons overbook because they expect a certain percentage of people to miss the plane, and by overbooking, they can make sure they get enough money to keep the ariline profitable.

It costs a lot to buy, maintain and operate an airliner. With increase in fuel costs and of competition, The airlines have to make sure everypossible set is fill on a flight to avoid bankruptcy, If an average of 8 percent of people miss their flight. If a 777 seats 300, 8 percent would be 24 empty seats per flight. thats 24 fares that will likey go to the competition, as most will take the next availabe flight on an alternate airline..

Because the airlines have statistics that show a certain percentage of people will not show up for their flight and the airlines would rather fill the plane or overbook than have empty seats even though they must compensate bumped passengers.

Passengers book flights and don't show up. They overbook to make sure the flights are full. Doesn't make sense to us but somebody in the back office thinks it makes perfect sense

Give up the seat for the deal.

Happy flying

Because you can't make money on an open seat. Airlines operate on such a thin profit margin that leaving 1 seat open could make the entire flight unprofitable. They can give out free vouchers because they are not giving you any money, just a future flight for free. Plus believe it or not, less than half of the flight vouchers are actually used.

Everyone's answers here are right. I worked as a gate agent for America West for 2 years and I got this questions CONSTANTLY. It shuts people up when you tell them that if airlines did not overbook flights that airfares would be TWICE the price they are now. YIKES!!!

Airlines always overbook flights. I think they do it because they're planning on a few people cancelling their reservations. I hate it when they do that because I have to fly standby and then there's no room on the plane for us standby passengers.