If so many people are stranded, why are planes flying with empty seats?
Now that flights in Europe are back to near-normal levels, one would think airlines would be spending weeks getting folks home. Let's consider that flights were canceled for the better part of a week in certain countries, and that with load factors typically greater than 80%, mathematically speaking, it should take 5x as long to get the back-log cleared as the disruption lasted - or well over a month.
Obviously it's not quite like that since many trips were canceled completely, and people found other means of transportation. But even adjusting for those significantly makes it seem like it should take a couple of weeks total to get people where they need to go.
This is confirmed by reports from stranded passengers. Airlines are telling them they can't get them on flights until this weekend or next week at the earliest -- suggesting the back-log to get to the US from Europe might be over a week at least.
So it was with some interest that I read Scott McCartney's Middle Seat Blog post in the WSJ last Wednesday:
What's the deal? Are airlines trying to make revenue instead of helping stranded passengers? Should they be allowed to do that? Who makes that sort of decision?
Hold off the airline CEO stoning just yet -- maybe it's not nearly as evil as it seems. I've heard from people in the know that these flights to the US from Europe are actually flying with empty seats!
How is that possible? Airlines normally rely on historical data and knowledge to predict how many seats will actually be filled on a flight. They take into account the number of seats booked (or over-booked), the likelihood that booked passengers will cancel or take another flight, and how many last-minute bookings they might get.
But the volcanic ash situation has left those models worthless. They are built to handle normal operations, not such massive and unprecedented disruption. They cannot even begin to account for the fact that many passengers booked on those flights might not even be in the origin city anymore, or they might have canceled their trip, or they might have booked tickets on 3, 4, 5, or 10 other flights on many airlines from a variety of European gateway cities.
Whereas normally 1-3% of passengers might cancel off or no-show an international flight, those rates could be vastly higher in the wake of the volcano. This makes it almost impossible for airlines to help people stuck in the back-log to get home, unless they tell them to show up at the airport for every flight and wait stand-by (which my guess is some people are doing, quite successfully!).
I can only imagine an airline wants to avoid overbooking at a time like this -- but since the models are so bad, it's really hard for them to nail the right number of bookings.
Managing disrupted airline operations is a tricky business, especially when it's something we've never seen before. The moral of this story is that the more airlines know about the passengers (where they are, where they want to go, etc.), the better they can plan. But when passengers try to game the system (e.g. buy 10 tickets), inevitably others lose. We're nowhere near having the technology, policies, and trust in place to allow airlines to "handle the situation" -- travelers will always try and take things into their own hands, and who can blame them? I know I'd do the same.
Posted by Evan
