The lead Senators, Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz, probably didn’t realize what had happened, as they did seek to do something useful for consumers, and the FAA reauthorization bill is sprawling and it’s easy to lose track of the details of every provision.
Sure, a completely honest mistake. No way our caring politicians would have let that language be inserted into the law.
I would love if these documents were version controlled so we could see exactly whose office inserted the language. Which makes so much sense, I doubt it will ever happen.
I wish I had a little better idea of how things evolved in the intervening decade. I don't know much about Open Law Library, to be honest, or who else these efforts are helping now. But these incipient years were great years here in town. The meetup scene was excellent in general, and Tom showing up & going through blockbuster hits like these efforts was just a mind-blowingly break-out-the-champagne joy-inspiration supreme.
It needs to go much further. The practice of overbooking flights must be ended, and compensation enacted retroactively. It’s not just about airlines - it’s about fair practices across the entire economy. There need to be visible consequences for fraud.
>The practice of overbooking flights must be ended
Overbooking flights isn't bad per se. There's good reason to do it, namely that people are inevitably flakey, so the airlines being able to oversell some seats allows them to get more revenue on a flight, and therefore allow them to charge everyone slightly less. As long as this is clearly disclosed, passengers are given an explicit choice and/or compensation if they're bumped, I don't see why it should be banned.
It isn't allowed in any other industry I know of though.
At an extreme, imagine getting a contract to work at company X, so you quit your current job and move to the other side of the country, just to be told they overprovisionned the position expecting some candidates to flake out and void your contract with a ticket to get extra bonus next time you get to work for them.
Or getting a loan to buy a house, just to be told at the last minute that someone else beat you to the line.
In most other situations we'd have the airlines eat the risk,and they'd need to find other ways to make it work (have a pool of non priority cargo to fill the plane for instance)
>At an extreme, imagine getting a contract to work at company X, so you quit your current job and move to the other side of the country, just to be told they overprovisionned the position expecting some candidates to flake out and void your contract with a ticket to get extra bonus next time you get to work for them.
You don't need to overprovision employees because if one person flakes out, you can move onto the next best candidate. There's very little cost to doing this, and therefore companies don't do it because of the negative blowback they might get if the scenario you described happen. Moreover, have you forgotten the tech layoffs of 2022/2023? They were underprovisioned one day, and the next they were overprovisioned, and hundreds/thousands got laid off. People even had their offers rescinded after they put in notice at their previous company, or after they've already located.
>Or getting a loan to buy a house, just to be told at the last minute that someone else beat you to the line.
The house isn't yours until you sign on the dotted line. Before then the house is heavily oversubscribed. There might be dozens of buyers with offers for the same house.
Making explicit whether a ticket is a guaranteed placement or is a waitlist would make the practice clearer.
I don't know what the no-show fraction is, so pulling numbers out of /dev/ass: airlines might be mandated to sell 85% of tickets as assured placement (with corresponding cancellation penalities), and 25% of seats as provisional or standbye. Most of the standbye tickets would actually be seated, some would not. (In my hypothetical, the flight is 10% overbooked.) In the event of a standbye ticketholder being bumped, they'd be promoted to guaranteed placement on the next available flight (and perhaps given a service upgrade as well.)
People with flexible travel schedules (students, some vacationers) could opt for a lower-cost provisional ticket. Those with fixed iteneraries or group-travel requirements (business travellers, families, etc.) would buy a guaranteed seat. Airlines could of course vary pricing by ticket class accordingly.
In this case, the status and pricing would be explicit.
And the overbooking / provisional fraction would likely vary by conditions --- high-travel periods, days of the week, and/or time-of-day might have a larger share of provisional seats. Low-travel periods, where flights are not fully booked would offer a larger share of, or exclusively, guaranteed tickets.
Much of what I describe already exists, but effectively all coach-class ticketholders are provisional. Bumping occurs rarely, but can be highly disruptive when it does occur. With an explicit class of provisional tickets, expectations and needs could be better met.
Overbooking allows for reduced emissions, as more flights are closer to capacity. Do you think that eliminating the practice will be beneficial on net?
Overbooking would be fine if all of their sales literature makes it clear that you're effectively buying a lottery ticket to get on the plane. If it's being sold as a confirmed ticket, it needs to be actually there. They already have a mechanism to do that too; you can get on waitlists.
Turns out they can't sell things at the same price when it's a waitlist, though.
Of all the reasons my travel might get interrupted, overbooking is among the least likely. It sucks when it happens, but so does anything (flight delay/cancellation, missed connection, etc.) that means I don't get where I wanted to on time. The compensation paid out to people bumped due to oversold flights is high enough that it's really almost a non-issue in practice.
Yeah as long as the compensation for involuntary deboarding due to overbooking is high enough I don’t see a problem with the practice. It would be a huge waste to force airlines to fly around with empty seats to reduce the already tiny risk of someone getting kicked off the plane due to overbooking and lack of volunteers.
That’s just not how contract law works, at least in the west. You will generally never be forced to fulfil your obligations under a contract, rather you have to (reasonably) compensate the other party if you cannot.
That's funny because airlines are now also straight up asking customers during checkout for donations to go toward some mysterious emission reduction expenses meanwhile C-suites aren't taking pay cuts. Why is this the customer's responsibility? Privatize profits socialize losses etc
I wonder what was preventing you from doing a chargeback if your flight was cancelled with no reasonable alternative? Then it's between the airline and their bank.
I did exactly that with Aeroflot - I had tickets to Thailand during Covid back in 2020, and obviously the flight was cancelled and Aeroflot was talking about vouchers and how it would keep holding passengers' money to survive through tough times - I've just filed a charge dispute with Russian branch of Raiffeisen and got money back in a month.
And since the USA is the proverbial land of the credit card and chargeback, what stops you?
> Since you can’t sue an airline, there’s little anyone can do except complaint to the Department of Transportation.
I think this is the really big WTF here: Why the hell can't you sue an airline? How did that become law, and why wasn't it overturned as clearly unconstitutional?
Has a case on its constitutionality been brought to the Federal Courts, and the Supreme Court? If not, there's your reason, and that's a reliably common problem.
Title left uneditorialized, could probably be changed by a mod. Shared due to context around the legislative and political mechanics that led to the outcome. Good read imho.
> President Bush approved the merger of U.S. Airways and America West
Which president Bush? And was it literally a choice made by the president? Or a ruling by some agency of the executive branch? And one of the carriers being in bankruptcy at the time of merger suggests the story might not be so simple as it is being portrayed.
This sloppy writing and the click bait title make this article hard to take seriously.
I would love if these documents were version controlled so we could see exactly whose office inserted the language. Which makes so much sense, I doubt it will ever happen.