The practice of overbooking has developed alongside the introduction of the yield management among airlines. The calculation of the profitability of a flight explains the phenomenon: to obtain the best revenue/passenger ratio. And revenue optimisation forces airlines to include in their aircraft load factor a quotient of passengers who will not ultimately take their aircraft. In business terms, this is known as a "no-show. This is usually due to a last-minute cancellation, or more often a missed connection. An empty seat is a lost seat, so airlines have got into the habit of sell more seats than the aircraft can actually hold.
In general, particularly sophisticated programmes will maximise all the elements of the flight, integrating the number of tickets sold on each fare, one-off incidents linked to the particular flight (no-shows, delays, etc), the time of year and the revenue. All of this will be used to determine the number of seats that can be sold in overbooking.
When this happens, the airlines will ask willing passengers to change flights, in return for compensation that is generally set by the civil aviation authorities. If there are no applicants, they will then themselves design "volunteers. Often, this will concern passengers paying the lowest fare.
The cases of violence reported on United Airlines are extremely rare - fortunately. Just as it is rare to be deplaned because of overbooking - software designed to maximise unit revenue is quite effective!
According to the US Department of Transportation for the period January to September 2016, the number of passengers who were prevented from boarding a plane on the airline's domestic routes totalled 359,376 over the first nine months of last year. This may seem like a huge figure, but it should be compared with the 495.1 million passengers carried during the same period, a ratio of 0.64%down one tenth of a point on the same period in 2015.
If we look solely at the United AirlinesBetween January and September 2016, 50,000 passengers were voluntarily or involuntarily disembarked, representing a ratio of 0.45 out of the 64.4 million passengers who flew with the airline. This result is even down on the same period in 2015, when the ratio stood at 0.79.
All the US airlines posted better year-on-year results in general, with the exception of Jetblue, whose deplaned passenger ratio fell from 0.02 to 0.82 between 2015 and 2016.
