Nothing you have said is untrue, they were just a little misleading with timelines on day one. I'm also a day one reservation holder (in Australia so timelines were different). They never lied, but the have stretched the truth with the occasional weasel words. I'm forgiving since they have never lied, but I'd appreciate them being a little more accurate with information.
They sound consistent to me? Your ticket guaranteed a seat for you, but they might've sold some other tickets or given out vouchers that didn't guarantee any seat - like those tickets also saying "you can take any other flight on the same day if they have room", companion passes, etc.
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.
I started to book two one way plane tickets the other day (with both Eurowings and Ryanair). During both booking processes I saw a messages claiming "seats are going fast, book now" or something like that.
However in the next step of the booking process I was allowed to pick my seat. In both cases, the plane wasn't even 50% full.
It's stupid if you make it so transparent to your customers that you are lying to them.
PS: I ended up not booking the flight that day, the next day one of the flights was 15% cheaper. :-)
PPS: I have my browser configured to delete all cookies when I close it.
Unless they're doing individual daily reservations, it doesn't work like that. You forfeit the entire reservation if you don't arrive on the start date, but you can always depart early.
I flew from Providence to Orlando last week. The airline's website said (paraphrasing) "we don't oversell flights; this ticket guarantees you a seat."
As we were boarding, the gate agent made an announcement (again paraphrasing) "this flight is fully booked, and if your ticket doesn't have a seat assignment, you cannot board."
The flight tomorrow is $59. January 11th. I only looked because the entire spiel ran counter to my prior experiences. Direct on Delta, Virgin America, Alaska, etc. Oh wow the same day ones later today are the same price!
I know we are splitting hairs because this isn't always the case, and what you offer is intended to always be the case along with being possibly shorter flights with quicker checkins.
I just think the messaging is a little off because the way it is described doesn't really solve people's problems, especially when they will be so often debunked.
They did intend to offer it when it was sold. Even in this scenario it was well understood that the added United employees were last minute. This is even more cut and dry not fraud than regular overbooking that results in a shortage purely from customer sales.
Don't both of those airlines make you pay more to select your seat? It's possible they were lying, but it also seems plausible that seats were sold but not assigned yet.
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.
"The two most important points are that you have to book at least seven days in advance, and can have at most four one-way reservations active at any point. By my math, that means you’ll get at most 16 one-way tickets booked per month. At most." [0]
Yes, it doubles at 6 days and under, but my point is, it's neither 14 days nor 21 days for pre purchase, and no round trip is required. The "old" thinking about fares is no longer valid.
I can sort of see it. On the one hand, it's reasonable to hold them accountable when an employee gives you the wrong discount. But if an employee, on their last day at work, decides to offer the next person calling all of the seats on a single flight for just $10, I think we'd all agree that it would be unreasonable to expect the airline to honor that offer.
It's the degree of misinformation that's relevant.
The post I replied to is written as if it is something different than it is (they write as if the contract guarantees a seat on a flight at a particular time; of course it doesn't).
I think it's a bad situation, but I also think people giving very high priority to price is a big part of the reason that the contract is shit.
Yes, pretty much all airlines are overselling. However, Air Canada employees speaking on condition of anonymity are stating that business as usual for the airline is to string customers along until the last minute, even if it is known well in advance that they are not going to be boarding. That is to say, passengers with GTE on the gate indication of the boarding pass will not be boarding but are lied to and told that they will be assigned a seat at the gate.
Regardless your views on overselling, you probably take a very different view about being lied to about your likelihood of boarding a flight as you check in.
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