Airline offers nearly £3,000 to leave flight after overbooking passengers

In the normal world passengers pay an airline so they can get on a plane, but for one flight it turned out to be Opposite Day as the airline started offering passengers money not to fly with them.

This is because they'd fallen foul of something which a lot of airlines do, overbooking.

Many airlines will sell more tickets than they have seats available on certain flights in order to make as much money as possible.

An empty seat on a plane will make the airline no money, it costs them the same amount to do the flight with or without a full complement of passengers so they want as many as possible.

Some passengers who book seats just don't turn up on the day or cancel their bookings at the last minute.

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Airlines calculate the average number of no-shows for a particular flight route and oversell tickets by about that amount.

If things go wrong and everyone shows up then they can always rebook some passengers onto another flight or give those who won't be going up, up and away some form of compensation.

However, on one overbooked flight it seems as though nobody wanted to get off the plane, leading the airline to make big offers to cajole someone into leaving.

Footage which has since ended up on TikTok showed a plane ready to take off, only they were seemingly one passenger too many and needed to find a way to get rid of someone.

The video showed passengers being encouraged to 'take one for the team' and disembark, leading some to call out their prices for leaving.

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Eventually the flight seemed to settle on a price of $3,500 (£2,880) but at a lucrative lump sum like that it was 'for whoever comes first'.

Plenty who watched the video said they'd have taken the offer in a heartbeat.

"$3,500 with food and hotel included?? Girl I would have ran," one wrote, while another agreed that they 'would be off that plane'.

Many others said they hoped to end up in a similar situation one day because they'd definitely take the money and run for the cost of a slight delay in their journey.

However, not all overbooking mishaps are created equal as airlines don't commonly overbook their more expensive tickets such as first class.

It's also the reason why buying plane tickets at the last minute can sometimes save you lots of money, if there are empty seats on a flight then the airline wants them filled no matter what.

Topics: Travel, Money

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker