Airlines are too greedy, fliers pay the price

Last week’s incident on a United Airlines flight highlighted the practice of bumping passengers on overbooked flights.

Airlines need to charge passengers a little more to compensate for late cancellations. Of course, that doesn’t fix what happened on the United Airlines flight.

It seems like the only way to solve this is to have airlines offer more money to have passengers voluntarily give up their seats. I’m surprised they couldn’t get four people to step forward when they offered $800. Make it $1,500 and people will step forward.

Another solution could be to have some kind of reciprocal agreement with other airlines to get a crew in place to cover mishaps. Something needs to change, though. The random selection of four people who have to lose their seats just seems wrong, even if they aren’t beat up to make it happen. Douglass D. Watts

Airlines are scamming customers with all of their ancillary charges.

Then they’re essentially getting paid double per seat when a flight is overbooked.

If they have so much money for compensating overbooked passengers, they don’t need to overbook in the first place. Howard Haskin Jr.

I’d make the exchange offer for bumped passengers something of actual value, like a gift card or cash.

The only time I’ve been involuntarily bumped has been with United, and the airline compensated me with a non-transferable voucher that was only good for a year. Some people don’t travel often enough to make it meaningful. Julius Cheng

Airlines should increase the reimbursement amount until enough passengers give up the number of seats required to accommodate an oversold situation. This is the only fair and transparent method for passengers. David Hatch