“Come on guys, $3,500, can somebody take one for the team?” the flight attendant said in a video captured on TikTok. “We’ll get you a hotel if you guys show up for us.”
13 passengers on an overbooked #Delta flight from #Boston to #Rome were given between $2000-$4000 plus hotel rooms to voluntarily give up their seat on the plane due to the flight being overbooked. 📹: @michaela_romanosmith
According to the account that posted the video, 13 passengers received between $2,000 and $4,000 to voluntarily surrender their tickets and end up in Rome on a later flight hours later.
“My job as a content creator is to share hacks that people really like,” finance content creator Sam Jarman told Fortune. “I need to listen to my audience and my audience loves anything related to flight, tips, hacks.”
“Getting a flight voucher is almost like getting cash compensation, in my mind,” Jarman said.
The incident was a turning point for not just United—which apologized for the “upsetting event” and for overbooking the flight—but the whole industry, according to Clint Henderson, managing editor of travel blog and news outlet The Points Guy.
“The airlines dramatically escalated the amount they were willing to pay passengers to volunteer to take a later flight,” Henderson told Fortune. “You sort of had this arms race because the airlines didn’t want to get in a situation where they had to force people off the plane.”
Even the DOT intervened, bolstering its denied boarding compensation rule in 2021 to prohibit airlines from denying boarding to a passenger or involuntarily bumping them if they checked into a flight before the check-in deadline, as well as clarifying that its listed requirements for financial compensation are a minimum, not a maximum.
As a result of the changes, United “substantially lowered the number of yearly [involuntary denied boardings] since 2017,” Hobart told Fortune.
“It’s always been a push and pull between airlines and consumers,” Henderson said. “I think this is a continuation of that.”
“The airlines are not always the good guys, so I don’t want to make it sound like that,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s not the most profitable business in the world.”
Moreover, the number of bumped passengers doesn’t fluctuate based on consumer demand or passengers hoping to cash in by intentionally booking an oversold flight. The amount of tickets an airline offers for an overbooked flight is based on its own predictions of how many people may no-show for a flight—and its own need to turn a profit.
Ultimately, Henderson believes compensation for overbooked flights, regardless of their frequency, is just another way for airline passengers to try to tip the scales of airline economics in their favor, especially when they’re feeling short-changed by the industry giants.
“It’s getting harder to maximize your battle against the airline,” he said.
