If you're about to board that international flight for your hard-earned summer vacation, read this carefully. Unless you check in really early, you could be offloaded. Air India created headlines this March when it turned away hundreds of passengers with confirmed bookings. But make no mistake, offloading is a fact of life for almost every airline.
Offloading stems from overbooking flights. Since there are no cancellation fees on international flights, no-shows are a routine problem for airlines. As a BA spokesperson says: "Like other major airlines, BA overbooks flights, because a proportion of passengers fail to honour bookings. If we did not overbook flights we would always depart with a proportion of seats empty and passengers who may have wanted to travel with us may be unable to do so." Adds a Lufthansa spokesperson: "A seat is, after all, a perishable commodity and we cannot let it go empty."
Where does this leave the passenger? Most carriers insist that where passengers agree to be offloaded ("voluntary denied"), they take utmost care of their passengers. All airlines normally provide five-star accommodation with meals and transport facilities. Some even have cash compensation for the inconvenience caused (see box).
How do airlines determine which passengers will be offloaded? In no event is a first class or a business class passenger ever offloaded. At the most, he may be downgraded, in which case the fare difference is refunded. Some airlines even offer a further compensation to the downgraded first class passenger. Lufthansa has a policy of asking its passengers to volunteer to stay back. "We look for tourists and backpackers who would be willing to stay an extra day," says their spokesperson.
AI, on the contrary, has a first-come-first-served rule, since that keeps complications at bay. "Of course, if some passenger insists that he needs to travel on the very same flight, we try and help him."
By and large, airlines try and hold the passenger by taking care of his needs since endorsing him to another carrier results in revenue lost on a seat, as well as extra cost. However, all the airlines say that if the passenger is adamant then they would rather do it than lose goodwill.
Apart from your rights as an offloaded passenger, it's a good idea to know how the logic of overbooking works. Each airline does its own analysis and overbooks depending on destination and season. Delhi and London are considered especially indisciplined by the airline industry in the matter of no-shows. So seats on this sector are always overbooked.
Similarly, during peak travel months like May-June and December-January, overbooking is comparatively lower while March, which is traditionally regarded as a lean month, sees as much as 30 per cent overbooking. However, as a travel agent points out, "This year, the Y2k bug threw schedules haywire. Leaves were cancelled in the US resulting in people travelling during February and March and this caught most airlines unprepared."
Of course, flights could get delayed for other reasons as well. Cancellation due to inclement weather is a normal event. Less normal are circumstances such as AI faced this March when a flight commander failed to report on duty. The flight did not take off and 400 passengers had to be accommodated on the next flight. Those already confirmed on that flight had to wait their turn till the next and so on.
Add to this the overbookings and, as an AI spokesperson points out, it took the carrier 20 days to stabilise its passenger schedules.
Wouldn't charging a token fee for cancellations solve the problem? Not really, say airline officials. Besides the cost incurred on a denying a boarding passenger is a fraction of the seat cost. The compensation figure amounts to barely ten per cent of the total revenue that the airline makes, but the goodwill it earns by looking after the passenger on ground makes up for it more than enough. "Ultimately we would rather have denied boarding than empty seats," they say.