Overbooking Airline Seats Helps Everyone When Done Correctly

We all know of the horror stories of someone being denied boarding from a flight when they have a ticket for that flight. Sometimes this gets violent, like in the famous United Airline’s case with Dr. Dao. There are also cases of airlines offering huge amounts of compensation to entice passengers to take a later flight. It makes many passengers wonder why airlines would ever sell more tickets than there are seats on the airplane. This “overbooking” practice has caught the eyes of Congress, too.

Yet overbooking is widely misunderstood. People often confuse overbooking with denied boarding, and yet the two are are only somewhat related. Many passengers enjoy the low fares available because of overbooking, and the odds of being denied a seat as the result of overbooking are exceedingly small. Understanding overbooking and how this affects airline passengers reveals the practice as not only logical, but desired: