They do the same sort of thing soliciting volunteers to be bumped from a flight for less in vouchers than they'd be entitled to had they been involuntarily removed.
I've made out quite well on United. I had 2 flights back from London to NY where I accepted a 3 hour delay (with lounge access) and made a total over of $2500 in vouchers. The terms were generous too—a year to use them (extended by a year because it was around the pandemic), and you could partially use them, it just added to a "voucher balance" you could draw from.
No, you made out poorly. Wouldn't you prefer to have been paid more?
>The terms were generous too—a year to use them
Are you for real? That's not generous.
And it ended up being around 3 or 4 years, but because of the pandemic. I honestly don't remember the original amount, 1 or 2 years. Either way I had no issue using them. I was even able to use them to pay for another traveler as long as I was also on the booking (bought my mother a ticket).
Side note: No need for this dismissive tone, my statements were obviously subjective—one person's generous can easily be another person's disappointing. So you're in violation of two HN guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Airlines _will_ frequently offer voluntary benefits in excess of this amount to maintain good relationships, and gate agents for, say, Delta, can even offer as high as nearly $10k [1], which is kind of crazy: you'd think they'd just fall back on the involuntary limits.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-10000-offer-to-switch-fli....
If you don't volunteer, you're much more likely to stay on the flight and not be paid anything.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/united-airlines-flight-over...
> Searches for ‘Volunteer’ Definition Spiked 1900% After United Airlines Incident
https://time.com/4733425/united-airlines-volunteer-definitio...
I want to see some damn collective organizing. Can you imagine if passengers had started revolting against the idiot agents who abused the person arrested there?
The more pain airlines feel from the ensuing bad PR as a result of the chaos, the better that flying gets for everyone. I want airlines to fear the power of the customer.
As a passenger, I appreciate that my airfares are lower and some airfares have increased flexibility because the airlines have a deep understanding of the turn-up ratio and sell tickets in light of that fact. I appreciate the cases where [probably without my awareness] a flight or cabin crew/member [or maintenance tech and part] has been last-minute flown in to crew/fix a flight that I ended up taking rather than having it be cancelled.
Does it suck to be IDB'd? Sure. Does it happen often? Almost never (around 23 in a million or 1 in 44K embarkations). People in the US are about 5.5 times more likely to be killed in a car crash in a given year than be IDB'd on a given flight.
The airlines just don't want to pay fair market value to get someone off the plane and they get to use violence to get their way.
That means the airline most frequently reaches an acceptable agreement to someone. You might wish that they used some other process, but the process they are using usually gets to an agreement as it is.