Learned the hard way: Arrive at the airport first!
Oldbitcollector (Jeff)
Posts: 8,091
Anyone else get to spend an extra day in CA after UPEW?
Frontier oversold the flight by 9 seats! Since they have already been paid for
each seat on the plane, they expect that a certain number of folks won't show up,
and they can sell same seat again! Apparently this is considered a common practice
with all airlines and they don't really care how upset you are when you are left with
the short straw. Incredible! Thank you Parallax for treating all of your customers
like 1st class passengers!
Oh well.. It gives me one more day to rest before I got back to the grind.
BTW, There were hundreds of photos taken by several people. Everyone will get a chance to really see what UPEW '10 was like very soon!
OBC
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Frontier oversold the flight by 9 seats! Since they have already been paid for
each seat on the plane, they expect that a certain number of folks won't show up,
and they can sell same seat again! Apparently this is considered a common practice
with all airlines and they don't really care how upset you are when you are left with
the short straw. Incredible! Thank you Parallax for treating all of your customers
like 1st class passengers!
Oh well.. It gives me one more day to rest before I got back to the grind.
BTW, There were hundreds of photos taken by several people. Everyone will get a chance to really see what UPEW '10 was like very soon!
OBC
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Comments
I've seen it and it is a common problem.
Suppose next time If I'm in line ordering food and the guy behind me orders something I would rather have ordered for myself, I can just claim his order and make him go through the line again? That seems about the same tactic that the airlines are using... either way, the airlines are getting $$$ from someone, they don't really care who it is, just as long as there is some sort of positive flow from their perspective.
Sorry for your troubles, hope things improve!
If it's any consolidation ... my flight from Denver to Sacramento said that I was already on the plane ( Yes, that was me that held up the line ).... mind you it didn't show that the seat was double booked, it showed that I had already had my NAME scanned for that particular flight and was already on the plane.
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Beau Schwabe (Parallax)) : 6/29/2010 4:54:04 PM GMT
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Leon Heller
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Rich H
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The Simple Servo Tester, a kit from Gadget Gangster.
I always buy my tickets on the internet, then "check in" on the internet or arrive early and check in at a computer terminal (while everyone else is waiting in line and have not yet checked in).
And if you are ever at a gate and they cancel a flight, "run" to the ticket counter so you are the first one there! There may only be·a few seats available on other flights going out, so you're best to be the first one at the counter.
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My wife has had that happen and the airline put her up in a Hotel Room for the night, paid for meals and got her upgraded seats on the next available flight. If thiis airline you got did not, I would not go with them ever again. It's all about customer service with me. If they don't care, neither do I, and I will tell everyone I can what happened.
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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering
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And maybe even another alternative to air travel.
If you think the human interaction related to rebooking canceled flights is helpless, you should see how United handles this problem in Denver International Airport. There are no airline company humans, anywhere. But there's a whole set of kiosks strictly for re-booking missed flights. There's nobody to complain to, nobody to ask for a hotel voucher, nobody to ask for a cot.
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Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
Follow me at http://twitter.com/ParallaxKen for some insider news.
I avoid the Airlines If I can ,,
I have found this thing called amtrak . its not to fast but its Super fun and I can get work done on the train .
I rewrote some BS2 labs for My proff while on my way to vegas a few weeks ago .
I evain broight my HW board on the train . ..
Peter KG6LSE
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"Carpe Ducktum" "seize the tape!!"
peterthethinker.com/tesla/Venom/Venom.html
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
LOL
Even this much is happening less and less. Airlines find a lot of excuses these days to avoid the hotel and meal vouchers. I've been given those quite a few times in the past. Luckily, any flights that have been canceled recently have left me near relatives so I had a place to stay.
I wish I could do that. I have a 2 hour round trip that I take several times a year. It would take me 2 days (including things like hanging out in a train station in the middle of the trip for 12 hours) to go by Amtrak.
I've run into situations where there were humans present but they were completely overwhelmed (airport shut down due to snow). There were people in lines everywhere in front of counters, kiosks, and airline phones. I couldn't get through to the airline on the regular number but I happened to remember the international flight number and called that (even though my flight was within the US). I got somebody right away and was able to rebook (of course, I ended up rebooking several times over the next two days trying to get a flight that wasn't actually cancelled).
I'm flying internationally on Saturday - hopefully things will work out ok. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
The airline booked us on a later flight in about 4 hours, but also added us on standby on a totally full flight in 2 hours.
As the time approached for the 2 hour later flight, the plane was so full, with everyone having checked in, that the airline started paging for volunteers to give up their seats, in exchange for $500 in future flight vouchers, so I figured there was no hope.
But when the departure time came for that flight, four people just didn't bother to show up! They were paged by name, but when they didn't arrive in person at the gate, we were given their seats! We got onto that flight!
So I guess it's pretty common to be doing a little juggling of people to either try to fill those last few seats, or to book extras on later flights.
I have to give the airline credit - it was our own fault for missing the original flight, but they booked us on later flights with no problems, no questions asked.
But if you've got seats assigned, you won't be overbooked, will you? How could they sell the same actual seat assignment twice? I've never heard of that. I'm guessing that overbooked people must have sort of a standby status, where they're not really booked until they confirm their seats.
Our lesson - don't expect to show up at the "departure time" and get on the plane!
I've been racking my brain to come up with any other business which is allowed to behave this way.
The only thing I could think of was the time share scam that happened a while back where time shares
were resold to more than one person with the idea that not everyone would show up to use them.
A quick Google search of my recollection revealed that the person behind it was imprisoned.
Illegal everywhere but for the airlines.. Love this country! [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Bring on the high-speed, cross country train! Love this idea!
OBC
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I took a train once home from school, Champaign to Chicago. Spent the whole trip in the head. Amtrak had sold tickets to everyone that wanted on so there were people sitting everywhere and on everything. Worst trip ever. Supposed to be a 3 hour trip for 180 miles. Took 6.
I don't really have a solution short of somehow stopping the travel period. Video conference? Virtual meetings? Lose something not meeting in person.
I don't know if it'll ever be reasonable to expect cross-country high speed rail here (but I'd sure be game to give it a try!), but regional high speed rail is a no-brainer. And if people took trains between Milwaukee and Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit (well, okay, not Detroit) and Pittsburgh and so on, there'd be·fewer little regional jets taking up take off and landing slots at O'Hare, and FAR less hassle during bad weather conditions (trains still run during storms - that's an extremely important difference). In short, high speed rail would improve air service (though perhaps at increased ticket prices, though the airlines do seem to expand and contract their capacity fairly easily to match demand).
In France, at least, the TGV (high speed trains) run on dedicated tracks referred to as the LGV (lignes de grande vitesse). The same trains are capable of running at lower speeds on regular tracks, and in fact I've ridden some routes on TGV trains on regular tracks one year, and the same trains on dedicated tracks the next year. It is very expensive to build dedicated tracks for high speed rail, and I doubt that we'd ever be willing to put that kind of money into tracks running across the country (Would you take a fast train that still took 12+ hours to make a trip that an airplane does in 3-1/2?). But again, within a region is a different matter.
The French did not build the entire system at once. There were lines built from Paris to Marseille and Lyon well before they put in the recent "LGV Est" line to the east and on to Belgium.
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I believe that it's very routine for people to not show up for their flights, surprisingly enough, and I think you have to give the people who do that some of the blame for airlines' overbooking of flights. But since refundable tickets are already considerably more expensive than non-refundable ones, it seems to me that the airlines are also counting on some income from people who don't fly but also don't get refunds/exchanges. I guess if I had money to throw around I might understand that kind of behavior. As things are, I don't.
Post Edited (sylvie369) : 6/30/2010 2:11:10 PM GMT
That's really terrible... maybe.
I'm not sure what's worse: having no humans to help you or, as was my case one time when stuck en route via St. Louis on TWA thanks to a pilot error, I had four people behind the counter literally laugh in my face simultaneously when I told them I was sent there by their own people to get the next flight out.
Maybe somebody could program the new kiosks to express sympathy, dispense beers, blankets and teddy bears, or at least to elicit ELIZA-like therapy in such crushing moments.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
of the airline's policy when you tell them that you aren't angry with the agent, simply their companies' policies. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
@Ken: That's enough right there to keep me from ever booking United. At least Frontier had a human who
could at least pretend to sympathize with customers left with the short straw.
OBC
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Remember the volcano in Iceland a while back? The airlines were all shut down, and most people on vacation had no where to go. The only transportation between Holland and the UK was a ferry boat that obviously now had a surge of high demand. Unfortunately the people in charge took advantage of this and raised the price from ~75 euros to 800+ euros!
Don't think that the trains won't do this to you.... It's any form of transportation!
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They, too, could have used the kind of "beer and teddy bear" kiosks I described above. So, Corbin, there's your big chance to make your first billion dollars. That, and find a way to detect and map out and predict the movements of clouds of invisible volcanic dust.
Go for it.
Overbooking is not an accident, rather it is intentional. They *know* they are selling too many seats.
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Airlines are, as Bill pointed out, quite different: they intentionally overbook flights in order to squeeze out the maximum profit (or the minimum loss, since we're talking about airlines). It's probably safe to say that most flights on the more popular routes are overbooked. The system for getting you to your destination later the same day is fairly well developed, but plenty of people still drop through the cracks.