Quit overbooking the flights to ridiculous numbers.
Maybe Shannon could address this problem and give some actual numbers.
Well, since we're being all serious now and stopped crying about the nonrev charge that never happened, I'll give you what I know based on experience. In my own city.
However, if you're expecting me to bust out with some kind of pie graph and dollar figure versus something or the other, you might find what I have to say pointless drivel.
MORE ONTIME DEPARTURES CREATES LESS MISX
That being said, I agree that the overbooking situation has gotten out of control, however I have no idea how to fix it. We definitely have a high no-show factor,but that has actually increased due to the recent consistency of our arrivals and departures. You can call it schedule padding, but I attribute my performance to being jerked into the office trying to find new ways to explain where we lost a minute. Employees here are being held much more accountable to the point where we're striving to get the gate side finished as early as possible AND beat the ramp operation so that if there's a delay we KNOW we were finished. Incidentally, the ramp knows we'll try to blame them if possible so they're doing the same thing. Voila, more ontime departures!
Wait!! Why are we offering twice the compensation and overselling the flights worse than ever? Well, I think that those responsible for the departure activities are taking more seats out of inventory and using them for "protection" - - seats they can hang onto until it gets really ugly and then release them for the oversold passengers whom volunteers were not possible. The end result is a flight that goes out at capacity, had been oversold by like 20 or something, but ended up only denying about three or four.
After a few months of this, the number crunchers find that it can be oversold by three to five seats more because of the seemingly harmless handful of seats that the gate staff has used for "protection".
The supervisor will book the protection and the agents will use it at the last minutes. It is the last resort.
Unfortunately, when I look at the PBT for FRA and it holds 29/259, it's already sold to 266 at 8am. 12noon it's at 270 and counting. Availability says there's still seats to sell and the number is going up and up and up. now it's time to board. The flight has already checked in 10+ pax too many , theyre standing in front of you, no one is volunteering and the oversold passengers are calling reservations saying there are still nine seats to sell, so why can't they have a seat?
Oh, and now LH has mtc and has started to rebook their passengers without a courtesy call because they see that we have a few seats.
Now the agents have a ton of people in front of them, families pissed because they're not together, oversold passengers demanding a seat in Envoy(fulll also) and compensation out the wazoo and frustrated because the chairman's desk says there's still nine seats to sell. (jerks)
So, in desperation, the last nine seats are built into a protection record so that the availability reads zero, preventing the ticket counter, reservations and any other airline from taking the seats and worsening the situation at hand.
They get 15 or whatever volunteers to get off the plane and go tomorrow (which is already technically full, but has 20 seats still to sell) give them a free ticket and send them to The Comfort Inn with some meal vouchers, advance seat assign them so someone else gets the short straw tomorrow and they're on their way. Whew! Thank goodness we took those 9 seats out of inventory or there would be nine more people in front of us!
WRONG. It takes care of the task at hand, but it throws off the statistics and gives the pencil pushers the idea they can oversell it even MORE because of the no show factor that just went up by 9 thanks to today's flight. 9 no shows were actually 9 fake people who were never meant to show.
There is no way for those bean counters to see that those were fake pnrs because they're just looking at bookings vs capacity.
So, it's just a worsening cycle and now we're so oversold we can't even use protection and we're having to offer one to even FOUR rtfc's to bribe people off their flights.
I'm sure that's pretty expensive, but I'll let someone else do the math.
Oh, you CLEVER DOG! You got me to monologue!! *tsk tsk*
