One of the plane passenger’s biggest fears is being grounded due to overbooking. It is a legal strategy of airlines to ensure that all seats on the aircraft are occupied. Since most of the time there is a small percentage of passengers who do not arrive on time for their flight or who decide to cancel their trip before the day of departure, leaving their seat free, companies play with a certain margin to sell extra tickets.
Despite being a widespread risk, it is not the issue that companies specializing in flight claims most often encounter, due to the speed with which airlines resolve the matter. Now, you have to know how to deal with these situations and, above all, know your rights. The airline is always obliged to compensate the user who has been left on the ground and the most correct thing to do is through compensation, not with company bonuses, as is common.
“Airlines oversell on all the flights they operate. That’s how it is,” says Noemí Fernández, manager of Reclamio, a flight claim platform. And he adds: “People often do not know that they have the right to claim and usually settle for a simple bonus, less than compensation – of about 100 euros. In this way they lose compensation ranging from 250 to 600 euros.”
In 2023, only 4.14% of the complaints processed by Reclamio were due to the practice of overbooking. This is because airlines negotiate a quick and easy solution – compensation vouchers – which passengers accept without knowing their right to a better alternative, he points out.
There is no guide or crystal ball that allows you to anticipate and know which flights will present overbooking problems, but there are a series of indicators that allow you to activate the alarms, according to Fernández. “The fact that the airline sends us an email offering a flight change along with a bonus is a sign. Also, if we are not allowed to check-in online it is because that flight is probably overbooked.” With this strategy, airlines force passengers to go to the airport in advance and go to the check-in windows where, depending on the order of arrival, they will be given an assigned seat or an alternative ticket due to overbooking.
In Spain, national companies lead a large part of the ranking of overselling cases. “Vueling, Volotea, Iberia and Ryanair are the airlines that register the most incidents. Their relationship is in low-cost flights, through which they try to sell the greatest number of seats possible,” concludes Fernández. Furthermore, he adds, “Vueling and Ryanair have reduced their cut-off time for online check-in. They do this to reduce the range of passengers, discarding those who will be left out.”
The flights that are most at risk of presenting setbacks due to overbooking are usually those with highly demanded destinations, especially in high season, also those flights that operate on routes with many frequencies, business hub routes (such as Brussels, London, Paris or Madrid and Barcelona) during the week, low-cost airline flights or small planes. The date of the trip is also important: high seasons, weekends and long weekends are more likely for the problem to occur.