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Comment by odiroot | Hacker News Reader

It would have been ironic if the flight was overbooked and they couldn't buy a ticket/board.

Within the EU, flights rarely get overbooked. Especially on cheap flights like with Ryanair, the reimbursement that the airline has to provide in case of overbooking can easily be more than 10x the ticket value.

The cultural difference between the US and Europe is very interesting. In the US, when a flight is overbooked, the airline is allowed to bump anyone if they provide good enough compensation. Usually what happens is the airline “auctions” being bumped where they keep upping the “benefit” for staying. Usually that’s just a voucher for the next flight out, a gift card for the future, and a nights stay in a hotel. “We’re sorry we got greedy, and made you miss your multi million dollar business deal, and it fell through. Here’s some money that you can only spend with us. We hope to see you soon!”

At the extreme, if no one takes the offer, they’ll just bump some rando and you have to pray it’s not you.

Of course, nothing is done about it because it doesn’t happen enough for enough people to complain. I also bet that the airline’s systems are programmed to never choose a powerful enough person for the rando being bumped. You wouldn’t want to bump a Congressperson, right? That’d be just rude!

I’m sure they have a list of VIPs, but just “frequent flyer” seniority is a good proxy that sorts the powerful from the plebs.

Just curious, but why wouldn’t one expect reliably repeat customers to be treated with increased consideration in these circumstances?

Seems to me this is true in pretty much every industry, yet for some reason with flights, certain folks (likely not the FFers) get very upset to realize their price sensitivity/lack of airline stickiness moved them to the back of the line.

Can go both ways. The non-loyal flyers may never book with you again if they don’t get what they want.

A lot of the FFers don’t have much freedom in their booking, and are in too deep in the FF program to switch preferred airlines now.

The frequent flyer programs have less lock-in than you might imagine. Many airlines have status match programs, where someone who has status in one airline's frequent flier program will be extended the equivalent status in another's for a short period of time. If the passenger maintains a certain level of activity with the new airline, they keep their status.

As someone that's taken these offers before I think you're making a lot of assumptions. Yes there's some people on the plane with important business but on a plane with a 100+ people it's exceedingly likely there's also people casually travelling. $500+ in airline credit to move their flight to the morning is a real deal.

Personally I'd rather be in this system and pay lower airfare prices than pay a premium to guarantee I'll never be bumped off my flight.

For me, the rub is with the benefit being a credit, not cash. If I’m not flying frequently enough, those credits are kindof worthless. Don’t they also have expiration dates?

Ryanair famously also increases prices closer to takeoff time.

They give big discounts to people who book early and make their planning process easier.

In theory this makes the need for overbooking less necessary. If you don’t show up you’re not getting your money back anyway and the plane will use less fuel on its flight.

This from the airline that wanted to charge people for using the toilets. If overbooking was a better model I’m pretty sure they’d use it.

It was a ryanair flight. They know exactly how many people are going on their planes, because every unsold seat could be another €20 and someone looking for a return ticket.

If you're associated with the Belarus KGB it's probably not too hard to have some passengers suddenly missing their flight for one or another reason. Probably they don't even need to buy a ticket, flash your badge at the airport and most guards/staff there lets you through.

I'm not sure how kindly the Greek authorities would take having KGB operatives on their soil

WHY would it work like that?

Seems like a great way to get detained by Greek airport security. I do not see why Greek airport staff would do anything other than call security when someone flashes a KGB badge.

LOL do you think they actually carry badges? That would be quite incriminating.

Instead, it’s more like they are carrying fake passports issued by the Russian Federation. But, one likely would not get caught traveling on a fake passport issued by their country’s government’s spy service, unless they had already travelled on another (perhaps legit) passport abroad (Russia has internal passports too) that has fingerprint information in combination with a photo of the individual. This drastically reduces false negatives when things like this need to be flagged.

My US passport only contains a photo as biometric information, while my European Union passport contains fingerprints and my photo as biometric information.

Russia provides passports for Belarussian agents?

Yeah they apparently had Russian passports and the full support of the Russian state.

Maria Zakharova even wrote that “It is shocking that the West calls the incident in Belarusian airspace ‘shocking,’”.

She is the Director of the Press Department for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is famous for claiming things as ludicrous as this one…

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/konstantinbenyumov/mari...

Thanks. I could swear like a decade ago it seemed like Belarus and Russia had had a falling out but I guess they patched things up since then (or the falling out didn’t impact cooperation like these passports).

Belarus is the last Soviet satellite.

> flash your badge at the airport and most guards/staff there lets you through.

No? Why would that be the case?

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