If so many people are stranded, why are planes flying with empty seats? | Hacker News Reader

If so many people are stranded, why are planes flying with empty seats?

blog.flightcaster.com

57 pointsjaf12duke16 comments

My experience was this. On a call to Delta on 4/20 I was told it would be Monday 4/26 before a seat was available. 15 minutes later I booked a DELTA/KLM flight to my destination that afternoon through travelocity (at a high cost).

When I complained to Delta after returning I was told the travel websites buy seats in block and resell them, so that is why they could not give me a seat. Oh, and there were several empty seats on the flight.

I was told the travel websites buy seats in block and resell them

If anything, this is technically wrong, as airlines don't sell "seats", they sell tickets. You don't have a guaranteed seat until your butt is in one and the door is closed.

But as the blog mentioned, perhaps the airlines have decided that overbooking is going to make them look bad during this event, so they are only selling inventory for available seats. Unusual, but it makes sense.

Oh, and there were several empty seats on the flight.

Which just means that some people bought tickets and didn't turn up (and that there wasn't anyone on standby for that flight).

Airlines can't win: If they overbook flights, people complain about being kicked off; if they don't overbook flights, people complain about how there were empty seats even though they were told there were no tickets available.

Didn't he just say Travelocity owned the tickets? If the airline's not directing the stranders to where they can actually buy flights (or the flights are too expensive on e.g. Travelocity), there will be empty seats.

I am not sure that's true and here's why: If I book a BA flight on Expedia I can use BA's online check-in and sit anywhere on the plane I want, if no-one's got there first obv. There's no bit of the plane that's "Expedia class" all together.

I suppose any travel agent could do that on-spec, but in normal operation travel websites are just brokers sitting on top of the same API the airlines use for their own sites.

Isn't that sort of like scalping concert tickets?

The logistics involved are hard. Really really hard. These are not boxes that are stranded. They're people. And people move around, change their minds, make other plans, book themselves multiple times, etc.

Right, but by definition a "stranded passenger" is someone just waiting to get on a flight back to their home. If people make other plans, change their minds, move, book a Disney cruise back to the states, etc. they are no longer the "stranded passengers" airline companies are concerned with.

At the very least, there are more people wanting to fly now than historical levels due to the volcano. That there are empty seats is very interesting (to me at least). ;)

I think the issue is knowing which are the stranded passengers and which are no longer stranded.

Aren't there people at the airports, willing to fly standby? That's as close to a box as it gets.

Assuming airlines are trying to maximize their bottom lines, if they want to capitalize on this spike in demand to offset the lower demand that resulted from the flight restrictions, they might be wanting to slowly fill up flights by gradually lowering higher prices.

The idea would be to only have a few empty seats. If the flights are full, their prices might be too low. Eventually everything will return to historical equilibrium as stranded passengers exit the market.

Altruistic airlines might go out of their way to get stranded passengers back to their homes, which could build customer loyalty and long-run revenues, however.

(This is just all wild speculation.)

Yeah, but people have already paid for the tickets, and the airline is obliged to transport them. They are already weeks late on their obligation, which doesn't make them look good. Using this time to play pricing games ("ah, those stranded travelers already paid us, we'll transport them whenever") is going to subject the airlines to the attention of government regulators, which is not something they enjoy. Presumably.

The models are optimized for the 99% of the cases without any special circumstance. Airlines overbook by x% because they know that a lot of people won't show up, they increase the price over time etc.

I can see that an event like this can throw the whole system out of whack. It's not obvious how the parameters should be altered. Without any data about how many people will buy more than one ticket in a situation like this, predictions are impossible.

> "they increase the price over time etc."

Interesting note: I have a friend in the airline industry, and according to him time-to-flight has no effect on ticket price. Rather, airlines assign prices to seats - and sell from the cheapest first. So theoretically if nobody buys tickets to a flight, it will still be cheap even the day before departure.

I guess different airlines have different pricing models, but other people have built businesses around predicting when airfare prices will fluctuate. See:

http://www.bing.com/travel/about/howWorks.do

(nee Farecast.com)

Yes and no. Price is relative to demand. If the plane fills up ahead of expected, demand is assumed to be higher and prices will go up. If the plane is more empty than predicted, fares will fall. Competitor moves can also impact this.

But even aside from that, prices go up as the cheaper fare classes get sold out. This isn't the airline raising fares, it is simply the cheap seats get sold out.

Finally, there are fare rules. The cheapest fares generally have 14 or 7 day advanced purchase requirements. So without touching anything, fares will go up at those time increments as the cheapest fares are no longer available, even if seats are still available. This is to protect the airline from selling cheap seats to last-minute business travelers with a high willingness to pay.

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