preparing for a hopefully oversold flight

On Friday, I'm headed to SFO for a conference. It's going to be a very busy city, and thus the flights into SFO are actually quite full. They're not as full as they were during the conference held in Hawaii because Hawaii required specific gateway cities to be used in order to access the island. The same can't be said for San Francisco where there are hundreds of flights from all over North America coming and going everyday. The total number of ways to get to SFO are vast, and getting a seat somewhere is likely.

I'm flying United from Vancouver. It's exciting because using the mobile app, it shows only 13 economy plus seats, 1 regular economy, and 3 business class seats open. It doesn't actually mean that there are 14 economy seats available. What's more likely is that people have booked the flight, but don't want to pay the upfront economy + fee, and are just waiting for people to vacate their current economy seat (e.g., via an upgrade) before getting a seat assigned.

Most flights these days are oversold if possible, and that's important to know. Airlines know that there will be some people who won't make the flight or who will cancel last minute. Therefore, they can give that newly emptied seat to the oversold passenger. This ensures that as few seats go empty as possible. However, when everyone shows up on that oversold flight, the airline will try to bump people up a class of service. They'll bump those with status up from economy to economy +, or from economy + to business. If that's not enough to free up seats in economy, then they ask for volunteers. Usually, they pay volunteers a nice sum to take either the next flight out, or a flight that is convenient for the airline.

Playing around with the united booking engine, I can only make a dummy booking for two seats. Even for just one seat, the booking engine still maps onto a business class fare. That means that the airline doesn't even want to sell any more economy seats on that particular flight. They know that it is so overbooked that they are at risk for paying out more in compensation than they are to make money off of the potential no-shows and mis-connects. So this is simply exciting.

The last time I volunteered to be bumped was on my first trip out to HNL. They were looking for three volunteers to go onto the next direct flight, roughly 4 hours later. They offered a $400 voucher, which was almost the price of the ticket to go itself. I didn't have any plans, didn't know anyone in hawaii at the time, and I already had lounge access. So I raced to the podium, got my $400 voucher, and then parked myself in the lounge for the rest of the afternoon.

I'm not going for the actual conference, however. I took vacation time and not conference time. So I don't feel bad at all missing the conference. So the bf and I had a quick discussion about what our personal limit was: How much money are we willing to accept in the case of an oversold flight in order to arrive the following morning? Our answer: no less than $300 a person. I would agree as well. So we will see. I don't mind losing a day in SF when the compensation is almost enough for a new ticket back anyway!