As for the 4 employees - there is staff travel for personal reasons (ID travel, interline discount, heavily discounted, stand-by), where you have lower priority than paying pax. There is booked staff travel, where you have intermediate priority. But then there is travel for operational reasons (positioning), where you have higher priority, because if you don't get there, a whole planeload of pax (and more, due to knock-on effects) won't fly. So, the number of available seats was reduced, and insofar it was overbooking.
And certainly all this should have been sorted out before boarding, no doubt, and normally is. (Apparently only 6 in 100,000 pax or so are IDB, by the way.)
But imagine a seatbelt turns out to be broken, or the wind is so strong that they have to load more fuel and reduce weight, or whatever. Then there's a seat less, for operational reasons, and someone has to leave, even if they had boarded already.
Deadheading crew has higher priority than pax, because without crew planeloads of other pax don't fly. The airline had, for operational reasons, fewer seats than pax with confirmed reservations. Do you call it overbooked or not, who cares: something has to give, as is anticipated in the conditions of carriage, an entirely normal thing: sometimes you might not get on a flight, or even be bumped off a flight.
I realize that "overbook" can mean different things but United flight #3411 wasn't oversold to statistically offset no-shows. Instead, the plane had a capacity of 70 seats[1] and United sold all 70 seats to paying customers with zero cancellations. That's a perfect economic situation for United.
What went wrong was 4 extra United employees needed a last-minute ride on that plane to Kentucky. Since this is an HN audience, I guess we could frame it as a massive failure in the "information flow" through their computer reservations system.
The very second that United knew they had 4 employees they had to acccomodate, their computer system should have immediately confirmed those 4 employees on flight #3411 first such that the plane only shows 66 available seats instead of 70. (Computers doing math for the win!) That way, either 4 of the customers get denied a boarding pass at the check-in kiosk, or they get denied at the gate that scans the barcode before they enter the jetway. Instead, United let all 70 passengers board and settle in their seats.
If United insists that their employees take precedence over paying passengers, their damn computer systems need to reflect that reality in the seating database!
All of those opportunities to have the computer system "help" were missed that would have prevented the situation from escalating to a bloody face plastered all over the news.
Even if it wasn't a passenger overbooking, it was overbooking in that they failed to properly account for the likelihood of having to ship crews around their network.
If their occupancy ratio was lower, then there wouldn't have been a problem, they could have fit the crew in. If they reserved 4 seats for crew on every flight, again there wouldn't have been a problem.
If they had even reserved 2 seats and run sufficient flights such that the crew got to the target airport in time there wouldn't have been a problem.
If they had brought crew in from two different starting points - it would have been fine.
It's still overbooking, just not oversold tickets.
The airline played the game, ran too lean and paid the price.
Much like an ISP having all their IP traffic going down one pipe, and not having enough room to send out the customer invoices because everyone is watching Netflix.
Sure I agree it is just a claim. But they overbook most flights, so it isn't really hard to believe.
They could have paid some other passengers already to not board, prior to deciding that they wanted to fly the crew and needing to pull more passengers.
That leaves the overbooking claim as misdirection, which isn't any better than a lie that they were overbooked, but it's a different situation.
So it was stupid business not to offer more money for other people to leave the plane (or to find some other way to move the crew), there's nothing to argue about there.
What did they do that should be illegal?
Overselling each flight makes the tickets cheaper. People want cheaper tickets. So it isn't obvious to me that over selling is wrong. Is the problem that they failed to stop the people boarding before deciding they didn't want to carry them on that flight?
I just wish people would stop repeating that this was an overbooking issue, it wasn't. Customers were being forced off the plane to allow employees on after the fact. That has nothing to do with overbooking.
What's really bad is that technically this flight wasn't overbooked at all. United decided to fly one of their crews when the plane was already booked to capacity and had paying passengers 'voluntarily' (what a funny way to use that word) give up their seats so they could move their employees around.
It's a totally ridiculous situation and their media messaging doesn't help at all.
Sometimes is pretty much all of the time. My SO works as cabin crew for one of the large airlines you will have heard of, and they typically always overcommit. It isn't just because they are greedy and want lots of money though (well I guess it kind of is). As you said, they know some people won't turn up, but also they may decide to change the class of the airline (economy and business -> economy, business and first) depending on how people book or what aircraft are available on the day.
How is this an over sold (overbook) situation? The flight was not overbooked. It was United that added employees that shouldn't have and I'm more and more convinced they did it illegally.
Yes, lots of things that are legal or established practice are not right.
But overbooking is almost certainly right. Look, fact is that some pax won't show up for their reservation. Without overbooking, planes would fly emptier, wasting money and damaging the environment.
The airlines have fairly good predictions in most cases, and people have different preferences, so that almost always in the small number of cases where there is not enough space you can get people to get bumped voluntarily. It's really a win-win.
There are many mechanisms for crew (and just airline employees in general - think mechanics on an emergency call-out to a remote airfield) to pre-empt paying passengers.
This case was exceptional in that those crew (presumably) showed up to the gate after boarding, but I've watched a set of mechanics walk up to a gate just as it was boarding with "must fly" company tickets and some of the last folks who had yet to board got denied.
I don't think there is a significant difference in calling this flight overbooked due to the 4 extra seats needed were on company tickets - it just typically happens behind the scenes 99% of the time and is invisible unless you're specifically watching for it.
Seems odd that the airlines keep talking about overbooking but while yes overbooking is an issue, it's not this issue. This issue is that UA wasn't overbooked but rather allowed someone to get kicked off who was already boarded because late staff wanted to catch a free ride.
JetBlue doesn't overbook, but they have removed passengers already boarded who have not violated any rules, other than they wanted to accommodate other passenger(s).
Overbooking is an issue, and they should either stop overbooking (though that means potentially higher ticket costs for everyone), or when they do overbook make sure they don't start boarding everyone until someone has agreed to not fly and offer the appropriate amount to get someone not to fly, such as the max amount or cash rather than a voucher. But once again, that's a different discussion, and SW and others should focus on the bigger issue at hand that UA violated.
Overboooking probably accounts for most of these incidents, but in this particular case they had to switch to a slightly smaller plane due to mechanical issues. So eliminating overbooking won't fix this problem completely.
However, having a policy of not forcing passengers to relinquish seats they've already sat down in would...
This misconception that the flight was "overbooked" has to die. The flight was NOT OVERBOOKED. It was sold out, but definitely not overbooked.
The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers.
I didn't follow the doctor-getting-dragged-off debacle closely but I have a question about the basic mechanics of what went down:
When I've been boarding on flights, they do the overbooking announcement at the gate and get volunteers to take later flights there, before people board. That makes a lot more sense because, in the event that no one volunteers, the airline can simply refuse to let certain people on.
They don't have to take the seat away from the passenger, they can just not to give it to them. Certainly, psychologically, people are a hell of a lot more attached to something once it's been given to them. I've toyed with the idea of taking a later flight before, but I'd be much less likely to do that once I was all settled into my seat.
How is it that the doctor was already seated when they "volunteered" him to not fly? That seems like the main fuck-up to me.
"More Passengers holding valid confirmed Tickets... than there are available seats."
If crew repositioning granted those four employees "must ride" passes, could United not make the argument that those four seats were then not "available" per that definition?
So: 70 ticketed passengers, 70 physical seats on the plane. Four employees arrive for repositioning. Now you have 70 ticketed passengers, 66 available seats. By the definition in the contract, there are more ticketed passengers than available seats, so the flight is oversold.
The one bit that I think does change this is the part I left out in the ellipsis: "that check-in for the flight within the prescribed check-in time". By the time they tried to remove people from the plane, the "prescribed check-in time" may have ended, so you could make the argument that, when check-in ended, there were still 70 available seats. But maybe check-in hadn't ended, so who knows. It also isn't clear from the wording if my interpretation here is valid: the check-in window may not limit the time during which the number of available seats is determined.
Also consider another "availability" scenario: 70 ticketed passengers, 70 seats on the plane. All 70 passengers get on, but 1 passenger finds that their seat is damaged. The crew determines that the damage to the seat cannot be repaired in such a way as to legally fly someone in the seat, at least not in the time they have. Now they have 69 available seats and 70 ticketed passengers, all of whom who have technically "boarded". Let's assume there are only enough jump seats for the FAs, and the flight can't leave one behind and fly without (assuming it's even legal to fly a passenger in a jump seat). What do they do? Obviously in this case the passenger is going to be more cooperative, because they physically do not have a seat to sit in, but is it differently legally? (Though perhaps this situation would fall under Rule 21, Section H, "Safety"?)
As for the 4 employees - there is staff travel for personal reasons (ID travel, interline discount, heavily discounted, stand-by), where you have lower priority than paying pax. There is booked staff travel, where you have intermediate priority. But then there is travel for operational reasons (positioning), where you have higher priority, because if you don't get there, a whole planeload of pax (and more, due to knock-on effects) won't fly. So, the number of available seats was reduced, and insofar it was overbooking.
And certainly all this should have been sorted out before boarding, no doubt, and normally is. (Apparently only 6 in 100,000 pax or so are IDB, by the way.)
But imagine a seatbelt turns out to be broken, or the wind is so strong that they have to load more fuel and reduce weight, or whatever. Then there's a seat less, for operational reasons, and someone has to leave, even if they had boarded already.
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