Talk about a silver lining.
It looks like all those news reports of passengers being bumped from flights and/or physically assaulted and dragged off the plane, have had a positive effect for everyone else: the number of customers being bumped from overbooked flights is currently at the lowest point it’s been at in 20 years. Travelers are least-likely to get bumped when flying JetBlue, Delta, and Hawaiian.
Tuesday the Transportation Department said that only one in every 19,000 airline passengers was booted from an overbooked flight in the first six months of 2017, that’s the lowest the rate has been since the government started tracking the practice in 1995.
The biggest drop happened between April and June, as airlines started ponying up more cash to convince passengers to volunteer their seats. Worth noting, while the rate dropped for the industry as a whole, United’s did not. It bumped 1,064 passengers from January to June of this year, matching the industry average.
The highest rate of bumping came from low-cost airlines Spirit and Southwest.
