A Reddit user claims Delta Air Lines was forced to bump as many as 42 people off a flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, although a spokesperson for the carrier has confirmed to us that the flight in question hasn’t been oversold for several months at the least.
According to the post on Reddit, gate agents were reportedly asking passengers to forfeit their seats on the flight for just $1,500, along with a seat on the next non-stop flight to Tokyo, scheduled to depart 24 hours later.
Over booked by 42 seats!!!
byu/Prior_Glass_2568 indelta
Reddit user Prior_Glass_2568 posted that one passenger on Delta flight 7 was excited to depart for Tokyo only to face a potential delay as they waited for passengers to give up their seats.
As for when this actually took place, we haven’t, unfortunately, been able to confirm. A spokesperson for Delta says they haven’t had an oversell situation on Flight 7 to Tokyo since earlier this year and it could be that the original person who made this claim, perhaps, misunderstood what was happening.
The maximum amount of compensation that Delta must pay for ‘denied boarding’ is just $1,550, but the Atlanta-based airline is sometimes known to offer as much as $10,000 per passenger if they voluntarily bump themselves onto the next service.
In fact, it’s in Delta’s interests to offer more in compensation for a voluntary bump rather than reporting higher involuntary denied boarding numbers to the Department of Transportation.
Overselling flights is a fairly standard practice across the aviation industry, especially amongst airlines operating ‘hub and spoke’ business models whereby passengers connect from one flight to the next.
Working on statistical models and historical data, an airline’s revenue management team will try to guess how many people won’t make their flight and then sell that number of seats above what is actually available onboard.
Unbeknownst to many passengers, this system works surprisingly well the vast majority of the time, but it’s not failsafe, and sometimes everyone on an oversold flight turns up.
Delta has been experimenting with just how much it can get away with overbooking its flights with CEO Ed Bastion recently boasting to investors that the airline planned to oversell some flights by as much as 5%.
The gamble doesn’t always pay off, and between January and September 2023, Delta had to pay compensation to more than 123,000 passengers who were bumped from an oversold flight.
In the vast majority of cases, Delta does a pretty good job of convincing passengers to voluntarily take a later flight. In fact, according to DOT data, in the first nine months of 2023, only three people were involuntarily bumped from Delta flights.
Airport manager here…. This flight was not “oversold”, rather it was weight restricted. This has been happening quite often on flights to Seoul and Tokyo since they must fly on longer routes to avoid Russian airspace. Longer routes require more fuel, and Delta needs to reduce the payload to mitigate that.
How longhave you known you are not going to fly over Russian Airspace. To wait until the day of departure is inexcusable! How many more flights will not fly over Russian Airspace and is this a restriction applied by Delta?
Gonna need a minimum of $5K for what would be a day less for vacation, $1.5K just doesn’t cut it for an international flight.
Yep, weight restricted due to headwinds and additional fuel required. Would think an expert blogger would be aware of such elementary facts like this.
You can’t get the eyeballs on screens with a headline like that. You have to go for the outrage.
How longhave you known you are not going to fly over Russian Airspace. To wait until the day of departure is inexcusable! How many more flights will not fly over Russian Airspace and is this a restriction applied by Delta?
Wow, how much money did you make off of this embellished, sensationalist headline? Slow news day? I guess they didn’t teach you about weight and balance constraints at your airline. Shame. Well, to ruin your story, all the passengers ended up getting on the flight.
Wow, how much money did you make off of this embellished, sensationalist headline? Slow news day? I guess they didn’t teach you about weight and balance constraints at your airline. Shame. Well, to ruin your story, all the passengers ended up getting on the flight.
No interest in flying Delta is affirmed.
I’d wonder if 250.6(b) would apply as it *sounds* like perhaps the necessity for a weight restriction originates from a flight plan change- and if so, might 250.6(b) apply as an “… operational or safety reasons…”
Come on. You know better than that. You know full well Delta wouldn’t overbook a flight to Tokyo 42 seats.
Today, with vastly different space planning techniques, a flight is over booked maybe half a dozen seats, if that.
Last I knew, the standard for overbooking was no more than 3%. To get to 42 would require a plane capacity of 1,400 passengers (not including the crew).
Also, though I don’t dont know the a/c type for this DL flight, 777-200 are notorious for being weight restricted.
Delta never had any regular 777-200s. They used to have -200ERs and -200LRs, but the -200LR was definitely not known for being weight restricted on any but the longest of flights. It regularly flew JNB-ATL.
At any rate DL7 is an A330-900.
It’s interesting to read about the overbooking problem being caused by weight restrictions, head winds, bypassing Russian airspace, additional fuel, etc. but aren’t those conditions known way ahead of time? Besides, I think you will find the overbooking problem is confined to just one continent. I fly out of Asia regularly for 35 years and have never heard of any overbooking. Except on one occasion, a call went out for volunteers in Centrair (Nagoya) airport of all places. You guessed it. Delta.
Winds aloft are not known “way ahead of time,” nor is weather at the departure airport (which often plays into weight restriction, though I’m not sure if it did in this case.)
And weight-restricted flights happen everywhere and have nothing to do with overbooking.
This is a silly article. The author should know better than to make silly assertions like this based on a reddit post of a screenshot ostensibly from Facebook (which may or may not even be real.) Next time contact the carrier for a statement before publishing something like this.
This article is a complete disservice to readers who rely on your publication for accurate aviation news. 42 overbooked seats is an astonishing number – it suggests a fundamental breakdown in Delta’s ticketing or scheduling systems, not a simple overestimate. Delta, with its reputation for efficiency, is highly unlikely to be this careless.
This kind of shoddy reporting erodes the trust your publication has built within the industry. Previously, I looked to you for insightful aviation journalism, but articles like this paint a picture of laziness and a lack of understanding. Basic fact-checking could have revealed the standard industry term is “Delta Air Lines,” not some trendy abbreviation “Delta Air”. Frankly, this entire piece raises serious questions about the qualifications of your writers. Do they possess a fundamental grasp of airline operations, or are they simply churning out clickbait content?
I really appreciate your feedback! I’ll be taking learnings onboard from this post and I very much hope to earn back your respect and time in the future! Matt