This could be a scene from an auction house: A Delta flight from Boston to Rome in September was so fully booked that a flight attendant begged passengers, offering them thousands of dollars and a hotel room, to give up their seats in exchange for a voucher and a later flight.
“Come on guys, $3,500, can someone take one for the team?” the flight attendant said in a TikTok video. “We’ll get you a hotel if you show up.”
According to the account that posted the video, 13 passengers were paid between $2,000 and $4,000 to voluntarily surrender their tickets and end up in Rome on a later flight hours later.
It’s not just a lucky few who get the chance to take advantage of fully booked flight vouchers from the airline. From January to March 2024, 23,699 Delta passengers volunteered to “Take One for the Team” in exchange for vouchers and travel benefits. In a common practice to ensure flights are filled, airlines often overbook passengers at the risk of switching them and managing inconveniences. According to rules from Ministry of Transportation (DOT), airlines must compensate passengers 200% of the cost of a one-way ticket for a flight delayed by up to two hours, and 400% for a flight delayed more than that—an amount that can be as much as $1,550. Airlines must compensate passengers on the same day of the crash.
But with post-pandemic travel in retaliation and labor shortages leading to record flight delays and cancellations, airlines have been willing to pay more perks to get travelers off oversold flights, anything from pizza slices for late passengers to $10,000 in cash. With the airline industry logging record travel days in the July heat, airline passengers are craving good deals — and the secret is known about how airlines are offering them.
“My job as a content creator is to share hacks that people really love,” says full-time financial content creator Sam Jarman. luck“I need to listen to my audience, and my audience loves anything aviation-related, tips and tricks.”
Getting kicked off flights was a blessing for Jarman in the years before he had kids. Getting paid to wait a few hours was a no-brainer for him, and he believes the next generation of Gen Z and millennial travelers—who Searching for expertise in luxury goods—They are good candidates to take advantage of the travel benefits that booking a sold-out flight can provide.
“Getting a flight voucher is a lot like getting cash compensation, in my opinion,” Jarman said.
Airlines are booked, busy, and damaged.
Getting kicked off a plane wasn’t always a perk of the airline industry. Before social media became an accepted tool for financial literacy, it was a way to document airline nightmares. In 2017, a United Airlines passenger was dragged off a packed flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. Several passengers captured the sight of a security officer grabbing the passenger—who was wearing a tangled shirt and crooked glasses—as he was dragged down the aisle of the plane on cellphone cameras and posted videos to Twitter.
“It seemed like something the world needed to see,” said Tyler Bridges, one of the passengers who captured the scene on camera. He said The New York Times.
When airlines can’t sweeten the deal with enough vouchers and perks to entice passengers to voluntarily abandon fully booked flights, they Scarcely United had to involuntarily remove passengers from full flights, a move that was even more controversial on this particular flight because the airline was looking for extra seats for its employees, Bridges said. United spokesman Charlie Hobart said at the time that the airline had asked the passenger politely to leave the plane several times, but he refused.
The incident was a turning point not just for United — which apologized for the “disturbing event” and for overbooking the flight — but for the entire industry, according to Clint Henderson, managing editor of the travel blog and news site The man with the points.
“Airlines have dramatically increased the amount they are willing to pay passengers to volunteer for a later flight,” Henderson said. luck“There was a kind of arms race because the airlines didn’t want to get into a situation where they had to force people off the plane.”
In fact, airlines have Almost instant changesWith Delta increasing its compensation for overbooked flights to nearly $10,000, American Airlines has updated its Transfer status To prevent the airline from turning away a paying passenger who had already boarded a sold-out flight, United implemented a policy requiring flight crew to check in an hour before flights to avoid having to turn away passengers on sold-out flights.
Even the Department of Transportation stepped in, strengthening the denied boarding compensation rule in 2021 to prevent airlines from denying or involuntarily bumping passengers if they check in before the check-in deadline, as well as clarifying that the requirements listed for financial compensation are minimums, not maximums.
As a result of these changes, “United has significantly reduced the number of involuntary boarding denials each year since 2017,” Hobart said. luck.
first class reputation
The 2017 United incident may be a distant memory for an airline industry that continues to grapple with controversy, but the way airlines handle compensation for overbooked flights is a microcosm of the often fragile relationship between passengers and industry giants.
“There has always been a tug of war between airlines and consumers, and I think this is a continuation of that,” Henderson said.
between Reduce seat sizes As the quality of food has deteriorated, commercial flights have lost their luster in the eyes of passengers. While airlines are trying to sweeten the deal with more generous vouchers and perks like lounges with massages and steaks, disgruntled customers will do whatever they can to gain an advantage over airlines they feel are cheating them, says Henderson. It’s an understandable sentiment for passengers, but it’s not good news for the industry as a whole.
“Airlines are not always good businesses, so I don’t want to make it sound that way, but at the same time, they are not the most profitable business in the world,” he said.
Despite record travel numbers, airlines have yet to see the increase in passenger numbers that translates into increased profits. Boeing delivery delays, inflation, labor shortages, and poor expansion strategies They are all scratched. Indeed, the bleak outlook for the industry has Henderson worried about TikTok trends and sharing hacks that could push many travelers to take advantage of overbooking rules.
But airlines haven’t found that a problem. The number of passengers denied boarding has fallen due to overbooked flights, with 0.27 passengers per 10,000 passengers denied boarding from January to March due to overbooked flights on the 10 largest commercial airlines in the United States. That’s compared with 0.29 passengers per 10,000 in the same period in 2023 and 0.32 passengers per 10,000 in 2022, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics. Consumer Reports on Air Travel.
Moreover, the number of passengers turned away from a flight does not fluctuate based on consumer demand or passengers hoping to take advantage of deliberately booking a flight that is already sold out. The number of tickets an airline offers for a flight that is already fully booked depends on its expectations of how many people might not show up for the flight—and its need to make a profit.
Ultimately, Henderson believes that compensation for overbooked flights, regardless of frequency, is just another way for airline passengers to try to tip the economics of airlines in their favor, especially when they feel unfairly treated by industry giants.
“It’s becoming harder to maximize the fight against the airline,” he said.