July 8th - Why I am such a fan of overbooking
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today I want to talk to you about overbooking and what a fantastic thing it is, if it is done correctly.
I explain how airlines overbooking their flights can have a positive environmental impact, and keep costs down for both business and passengers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the final independent travel podcast of the week from here at London. Heathrow with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:10.0 | Not sadly travelling anywhere but always happy to be at an airport and feel the buzz of people getting where they need to be. |
| 0:19.0 | Or sometimes not. Not because the flights or sometimes not not because the flights |
| 0:23.7 | cancelled not because of the technical problem not because it's delayed but because |
| 0:28.0 | it's overbooked today I want to talk to you about overbooking and what a |
| 0:35.0 | fantastic thing it is so long as it has done correctly. The reason I want to |
| 0:42.2 | talk about it now is well here we are second Friday in July already and given the vast |
| 0:49.2 | number of cancellations we've seen particularly to and from here at London Heathrow with British Airways, |
| 0:55.3 | that is putting extra pressure on the flights which haven't been cancelled. And it may well be |
| 1:01.9 | that there will be episodes of overbooking. And that simply means selling more seats than there |
| 1:09.6 | are actually fixed to the plane. So on a typical Airbus A320, for example, |
| 1:16.8 | you might have 180 seats and you might sell 190 tickets. How can you possibly do that? It wouldn't |
| 1:24.8 | work in a theatre or cinema or sporting venue, would it? Everyone's |
| 1:30.0 | got their seat assigned. Well, aviation, it does happen quite a lot and it's a fantastic thing. |
| 1:36.0 | I hope I can persuade you of that. Why do I love overbooking? Well, everybody, when it is done |
| 1:41.5 | correctly, is a winner. Let's start with the environmental impact. |
| 1:47.3 | Overbooking helps planes fly fuller, which means that there are less planes flying around |
| 1:54.5 | to carry the same number of people. Next, it keeps costs down. Airlines will be able to make more money because |
| 2:05.9 | on that 180-seat flight where they sold 190 tickets, well, guess what? Those extra 10 tickets |
| 2:12.6 | are probably going to be at top dollar because it's a really in-demand flight, which is why they're overbooking it. |
| 2:19.8 | And they will earn, well, let's say, several thousand pounds from those extra seats, even though |
| 2:27.0 | they haven't gotten on the plane. What they're doing, of course, is to try to guess how many |
... |
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