Miguel Valdespino

Oh, yes they do! Not every airline and not every route, but I've seen it on flights out of Mumbai to Europe.
It's normally around 10% and the rate is dependent on booking and physical class, passenger mix and profile, day of week, time of day plus a a myriad of other parameters or combinations of same up to but not including moon phases.
And if legacy airlines didn't overbook to compensate for no shows, fares would need to increase by a minimum of 5-10%. Fact.
JetBlue doesn't need to overbook to that extent - they've got your money, you pay $30 if you cancel before departure and there are no refunds. Just use the credit within a year.
Ryanair, for example, doesn't overbook at all. They don't need to.
They just don't refund, so every sold seat is guaranteed revenue.....

Bruce Bayliss

JetBlew=Every other airline. Get used to it.

zl9600

I spent 19 hours in JFK and then sat on a runway for nearly 3 hours trying to get to Seattle on a Delta flight the Friday of the ice storm week. Has Delta offered me or my very pregnant wife an apology for this ordeal? No, they have not. Have they offered me a lousy useless voucher? No, they have not.

Which airline am I more likely to fly on next time? JetBlue, by a wide margin.

Funklord

No amount of a voucher can make up for them ruining our vacation.

What this experience taught me was that JetBlue may be fine when nothing goes wrong, but you can't count on them. I still can understand how one snow storm can screw up an entire airline for 6 straight days. Do they have monkeys working there?

jabola1

Vouchers suck.
•Vouchers suck. Mark is right. His other points have fallen and this is all that remains. So let's consider it as the one remaining knock against JetBlue's Bill of Rights. Is payment by voucher enough to scuttle the ship? No. Sure, they could pay in gold bullion, but that stuff is heavy.

Hey, yeah, gold bullion, that's funny. And it also doesn't fucking address whether or not vouchers suck. You could replace "Sure, they could pay in gold bullion, but that stuff is heavy" with "Hey, look at the bird over there" and have the same effect. Vouchers suck because they force you to use their airline again during a certain period in a certain class (airline dependent of course). There is no penalty to the airline if they are not used. Plus not everyone flies frequently, which makes a voucher pretty much an empty gesture to that person. But really, strand me in an airport this long and no amount of vouchers is getting back on your airline for a very long time. Especially in winter.

Jeezi Creezi, get past this. Other airlines apologize when they screw up and you even get vouchers. Jet Blue isn't doing anything revolutionary or unprecedented. But then again, other airlines haven't screwed up on the scale Jet Blue did.

AcilletaM

Let's see how they do in the future before we pat JetBlue on the back.

skittlbrau

Still, even if you don't believe JetBlue, at least they're penitent, which is more than most companies that fuck up can say.

xboxishuge

shiwsup

superbmtsub

Because of airline overbooking, X number of people are offered seats when they might have had to keep searching elsewhere. Overbooking is based on an algorithm (one I don't know) due to the FACT that a small percentage of people don't make their flights. Stuck in traffic, get sick at the last minute, sleep in, I don't care.

Airlines don't overbook by 100%. On any given plane, based on my lifelong flying experience, I would guess 2-5 people are overbooked.
On the off-chance that everyone arrives, the airline's FIRST reaction is to offer vouchers (in my experience of USAir, Delta, SouthWest, United) not of monetary value, but of 1 free roundtrip ticket.

Why do vouchers suck?
Because you lose them? Because you forget to use them? That sounds like a personal issue to me. Unless you're flying on the two busiest days of the year, you get a free freaking flight for getting to grandma's an hour later than you planned by opting to take a voucher and volunteer off the overbooked flight.

When my flights are overbooked, the line of volunteers is longer than the ones at the food court. Let's keep the complaining to legitimate jerk companies who DON'T offer tons of free stuff to keep you happy.
Ah, that's just my opinion.

LaurenKitsune

Bourque77

No airline should be able to keep you on a grounded plane for longer than two yours. It is torture.

If it were me, I would sue for kidnapping or some such.

Isn't five hours their new 'limit'? Ridiculous.

This just shows how far airlines have to go, how little they consider the consumer.

I say the Feds should step in and regulate that industry a bit.

edwardoneill