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Travelers look at a display board showing canceled and delayed flights at Orlando International Airport over the New Year’s weekend, despite thousands of flight cancellations and delays in the United States.
Disrupted flights have become the new normal.
So far this year, 23% of all domestic and international flights in the United States have been delayed or disrupted, according to FlightAware, the flight tracking website. On the Friday before July 4, that number rose to nearly 30%.
That means more paying customers than available seats on planes — and passengers redeem by giving up their seats on overbooked planes, at a cost of thousands of dollars each. But airlines don’t just offer you that much money, says Willis Orlando, a senior flight expert at Scott’s Cheap Flights. Instead, he says, you have to haggle — and he has a few tips for any enterprising passenger willing to sacrifice their itinerary for maximum cash.
The airline’s offer usually begins with a voice over an intercom. If you have not yet boarded the plane, you will hear a gate agent offering an amount to give up your seat. If you are already on the plane, it will be a flight attendant looking for volunteers to get up and walk back to the airport.
Orlando’s first tip: show interest quickly, but never take the airline’s starting price.
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“If you’re flexible and you want that extra cash in your pocket… run up and ask them what the last person gets,” Orlando says. “It’s always the sweetest offer.”
You can also sweeten other parts of your rebooked experience. Orlando says airlines often want to let you into their exclusive lounges or let you choose a high-quality seat at the front of the plane on your rebooked flight. All you have to do is ask.
“They want to have guaranteed numbers…almost no matter what,” Orlando says. “If you step down voluntarily, the bargaining ball is with you.”
Orlando says airports in major cities like Chicago, Washington DC and Los Angeles are more likely to experience flight disruptions than others because they are frequent hubs for layovers. The airlines most often encountering involuntary passengers are Frontier, Southwest and American Airlines, he adds.
The above-average dollar figures are likely for two reasons, Orlando says: to make sure the plane takes off on time and to maintain the airline’s reputation. If not enough passengers get off a flight voluntarily, airlines have to forcibly “bump” passengers, often resulting in a customer service nightmare.
“If a plane is delayed by two hours because of a problem getting people out of a plane, there aren’t enough crews and pilots to make sure it doesn’t ripple through their entire network,” Orlando says. “Before the pandemic, they didn’t risk their entire network falling apart with one or two flights going haywire.”
If you’re violently bumped, at least you’ll be compensated for it: Federal law requires the airline to pay you up to four times your fare, up to US$1,550, depending on when your rebooked flight departs.
Planes are usually overbooked due to airline optimism, Orlando says. That’s especially true this year: When spring hit, airlines planned large numbers of flights in anticipation of high demand for summer travel.
That demand forecast paid off, Orlando says, but the airlines predicted no other problem: a lack of available staff to man those flights. Some crew members who were laid off or fired during the height of the pandemic did not return, and others miss flights due to Covid-19 infections during the country’s extensive micro wave.