A Delta Air Lines passenger has shared an incredible story of how they managed to make $5,000 off the airline by voluntarily giving up their seat on two separate flights on the same day.
Taking to the social media platform Reddit, the passenger who identified themselves as ‘Extreme_Mix6279’ said they literally ran to the gate when Delta asked for volunteers to give up their seats on a recently overbooked flight.
Delta was offering $2,000 for two volunteers, and the Reddit user, along with a lady, quickly took the offer, which meant they would have to wait around the airport for the rest of the afternoon for them to be rebooked onto the next flight.
The pair ended up flying together on the rescheduled flight which involved a layover in a third airport. When boarding came for the second flight, Delta had once again overbooked the flight and required at least one volunteer to offload themselves with the offer of $3,000 in compensation.
The Reddit user raced another man to the podium and managed to get to the gate agent first, bagging a total of $5,000 in compensation in a single day.
“They wanted volunteers to give up their seat for an overbooked flight this afternoon,” the Reddit user wrote. “I run to the gate and me and an old lady got $2k each. They scheduled us for the night flight. We waited together the whole time and we actually sat together in the flight.”
“We also discussed that if they need volunteers again we are gonna take it. As soon as we sat down, I heard the microphone about volunteers. I said I am doing it. I run and and got $3k. One other guy came also but I was first.”
Overbooking flights is a pretty common occurrence across the airline industry and has been going on for years. In the vast majority of cases, passengers shouldn’t even be aware that their flight has been oversold.
That being said, Delta does seem to overbook more flights than many of its rivals and CEO Ed Bastion has even boasted to investors that the Atlanta-based airline plans to increase the level of overbooking to as much as 105% of capacity.
Airlines overbook flights because not everyone who has bought a ticket for a specific flight will actually show up. By selling more tickets than there are seats they reduce the risk of losing out on potential revenue.
Overbooking is, however, a major gamble for airlines. Get it right and they rake in more cash. Get it wrong, and they end up having to pay compensation to passengers who either voluntarily take a later flight or are involuntarily bumped.
In the first nine months of 2023, Delta reportedly paid compensation to 123,000 passengers who voluntarily gave up their seats on oversold flights.
But how did ‘Extreme_Mix6279’ compensation payout compensation compare to other bumped passengers? Following the infamous Dr David Dao incident at United Airlines in 2017, Delta decided to up its voluntary bump payout to as much as $10,000 per passenger.
Generally, Delta gets away with not paying that much compensation and gate agents will start at a much lower offer before someone can’t resist the bait any longer.
And despite Delta’s penchant for overselling flights, the airline is pretty good at avoiding the need to involuntarily bump passengers off flights. According to Department of Transportation statistics, between October 2023 and March 2024, the airline didn’t involuntarily bump a single passenger, whereas American Airlines involuntarily bumped 5,685 passengers.
