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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

Overbooking allows for reduced emissions, as more flights are closer to capacity. Do you think that eliminating the practice will be beneficial on net?

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Overbooking would be fine if all of their sales literature makes it clear that you're effectively buying a lottery ticket to get on the plane. If it's being sold as a confirmed ticket, it needs to be actually there. They already have a mechanism to do that too; you can get on waitlists.

Turns out they can't sell things at the same price when it's a waitlist, though.

Of all the reasons my travel might get interrupted, overbooking is among the least likely. It sucks when it happens, but so does anything (flight delay/cancellation, missed connection, etc.) that means I don't get where I wanted to on time. The compensation paid out to people bumped due to oversold flights is high enough that it's really almost a non-issue in practice.

Yeah as long as the compensation for involuntary deboarding due to overbooking is high enough I don’t see a problem with the practice. It would be a huge waste to force airlines to fly around with empty seats to reduce the already tiny risk of someone getting kicked off the plane due to overbooking and lack of volunteers.

Why does the airline get to use violence to pay under market value to get someone off their plane?

Keep bidding up the compensation till someone volunteers. Don't like the cost? To bad.

That’s just not how contract law works, at least in the west. You will generally never be forced to fulfil your obligations under a contract, rather you have to (reasonably) compensate the other party if you cannot.

For more on this topic, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_performance

Why stop at that? It would reduce emissions even further if airlines were allowed to take customers' money and not provide any flights whatsoever.

Then they wouldn't get the chance to upsell you on overpriced liquor. That's where the real money is.

That's funny because airlines are now also straight up asking customers during checkout for donations to go toward some mysterious emission reduction expenses meanwhile C-suites aren't taking pay cuts. Why is this the customer's responsibility? Privatize profits socialize losses etc

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