Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Wednesday the 29th of November.

Now, if you're kind enough to be a regular listener to this podcast, you will know that sometimes I take

a subject which appears to be coming in quite a lot from listeners and readers of the independent.

And today it is downgaging.

And what's that?

Well, it's just airline jargon of which there is a limitless quantity,

which means in this particular case that typically you will have a Airbus A320 that is

downgaged to an Airbus A319. There's about 24 fewer seats on the latter kind of jet.

And that means that if you're an airline and you've sold 180 seats, you've only got 156 left, you have a problem. And I've had people getting in touch

because that sort of thing has been happening. And it's a kind of variant, a cousin of overbooking.

Overbooking, of course, happens when airlines think, great, we can make more money out of this.

We've got 180 seats on our flight, let's sell

185 tickets, and then hope that five people don't turn up. Most of the time, they get away with it,

and that's absolutely terrific. Down gauging is something different, but it is still absolutely the

airline's problem.

If they've got a technical issue or something else,

which means they have to use a smaller plane than booked,

then the extra people, a couple of dozen, however many it is,

are effectively in the same legal position of being overbooked. And the first thing that the airline has to do is seek volunteers and say, look, who's prepared not to travel today if we pay you? Well, often,

they will say the statutory amount of compensation, which is anything from 220 to 520 pounds,

depending on the length of flight. I've been in Madeira

where that's happened. It was supposed to be an Airbus A321. They didn't have one. They sent an A320,

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