Overbooking on flights to Tenerife is a marketing tactic that airlines frequently employ to keep profit margins as high as possible. Vacation is a time many people eagerly anticipate because it’s precisely the moment when you take a flight to other places for some well-deserved relaxation.
Upon arriving at the airport check-in counter, you are informed that your boarding pass has not been assigned a seat number yet. The flight is overbooked. In other words, the airline has sold more tickets than there are seats available on the plane. You might think it was a mistake, but it isn’t. This is a deliberate and well-thought-out marketing technique.
Overbooking is the general term describing the offer of more capacity than is actually available. A market provider anticipates that not all acquired services will be used and knowingly takes the risk of supplying more than is available.
Pre-meditated
Therefore, overbooking on planes is not a mistake, a system error, or negligence by a staff member. But why do airlines sell tickets that exceed the plane’s capacity? This practice is carried out with a very specific goal in mind: to optimize seat occupancy and thus make more profit.
It seems like a practice set up with premeditation. A risk and cost-benefit analysis is applied to calculate how many seats can be overbooked.
Cancellations
Statistician Nina Klietsch explains the details of overbooking. It’s not a practice limited to flight tickets only. Hotel reservations and even hospital consultations and doctor’s appointments employ this practice. The logic behind this phenomenon that encourages businesses to sell more bookings than available slots is based on one fact: cancellations.
Up to 10% More Tickets
This is about statistical data. Airlines have been collecting data from different flight routes for years and thus know perfectly the average percentage of passengers who miss their flights on each route.
If a flight route has a 10% cancellation rate, only 162 of the 180 seats will be filled. Theoretically, this means that 18 extra flight tickets can be sold than there are seats available. Overbooking occurs just when there are fewer cancellations than statistically expected.
All Airlines
You can perfectly compare this principle to a window seat. You like looking outside or want to take a picture, so you book a window seat, but upon boarding, you find yourself seated between two windows. Why aren’t airplane windows usually aligned with the seats? Precisely because more rows of seats have been placed in the airplane, allowing more passengers to be boarded.
Nearly all airlines apply overbooking on their flights to accommodate no-shows. The reasons passengers fail to show up can vary.
Missed connections due to delays of a connecting flight or another mode of transport and last-minute cancellations are the two main reasons.
Less Common with Charter Flights
And when overbooked passengers show up at the check-in counter, tricks are performed to fill as many airplane seats as possible. For example, second-class passengers are upgraded to first class if there is still space available, and the airline waits until boarding closure to see if any passengers have dropped out for the particular flight.
Then flights are bought off, and compensation is paid to volunteers who give up their seats for someone who wishes to take that flight. From experience, we know that low-cost airlines do not overbook their flights because their passengers usually show up. However, larger airlines like KLM, Brussels Airlines, Iberia, and many others do.
The Fine Print
At EUclaim, we hear that dozens of Dutch flights are overbooked daily, but passengers usually manage to board the flight using these tricks. At most, someone is denied boarding at the gate once a week for a scheduled flight.
Moreover, conditions are always attached to a booking that you agree to when you reserve a flight. And it is precisely in this carriage agreement that the rules regarding overbookings are stated.
Each airline has its own code of conduct, and passengers must adhere to it because they have agreed to this policy.
If you, as a passenger, have become a victim of flight denial, you can file a claim. Thus, the airline is obligated to pay compensations to affected travelers. Remember, overbookings on airplanes are not a matter of chance.
Overbooking on flights to Tenerife from United Kingdom is not an exception if we assume that all airlines worldwide use this marketing trick on a daily basis.
More TRIVIA can be read [HERE]
Charlotte Verhelle © Photography
Overbooking on flights to Tenerife ©
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