Southwest To Stop Overbooking Flights In Response To United Crisis

Southwest Airlines, responding to the ongoing crisis at United, will no longer overbook flights, a decision announced on Thursday by the Dallas-based company's CEO, Gary Kelly. The policy change is scheduled to go into effect May 8.

"I've made the decision, the company's made the decision that we'll cease to overbook going forward," Kelly said on CNBC Thursday. "The last thing we want to do is deny a customer their flight."

Earlier this month, Dr. David Dao, a passenger on a United flight, refused to give up his seat and was violently removed from the plane. A video of the incident went viral, and the Chicago-based company has been dealing with fallout since then, not always successfully.

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According to the Associated Press, 15,000 Southwest passengers were bumped from flights in 2016, the most of any other airline. The policy is used by airlines to deal with no-show passengers and is normally carried out without incident.

"We've been taking steps over the last several years to prepare for this anyway," Kelly said. "We never like to have a situation where we are oversold, which is a little bit different from an overbooking practice. At least for us, it will be something we'll be discontinuing very shortly."

Southwest is not the only airline responding to the United fiasco. Delta Air Lines earlier this month increased the payouts its employees can offer passengers on flights that are overbooked — agents can now offer as much as $2,000, and managers can dangle as much as $9,950 over a customer's head.

“It’s not a topic that is brand new to us,” Kelly said during a conference call on Thursday to discuss his company's quarterly earnings. “That’s one of the pain points we’d like to eliminate.” Kelly added Southwest had been reviewing its overbooking policies for several years and said that the United incident accelerated the process.

According to the AP, JetBlue is currently the only major U.S. airline that bans overbooking flights. Southwest spokeswoman Beth Harbin said Thursday that better forecasting tools and a new reservations system, scheduled to go live in May, contributed to the airline's policy change.

Main image: flickr/Ken Lund

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