10 Things Your Airline Won't Tell You

If you’ve flown much lately, you’ve probably noticed that air travel feels like rush hour on the subway. Indeed, as airlines get more efficient, they’re squeezing more people onto fewer planes. But that’s had an unintended consequence: More fliers get left behind. Airlines have always overbooked flights to compensate for last-minute cancellations. But they don’t always get the numbers right. And with so few seats open on later flights, fewer folks are volunteering to get bumped. As a result, the number of involuntarily bumped passengers is up, having grown 44 percent between the first nine months of 2005 and the same period in 2007, according to the Department of Transportation.

The silver lining for travelers is that airlines must get involuntarily bumped fliers to their destination within four hours of the expected arrival time or refund them up to $400. The bad news is that the problem isn’t going away—airlines are busy developing computer systems to help them rebook bumped passengers. “Instead of fixing the problem,” says Tony Polito, an associate professor at East Carolina University who has published several studies on the airline industry, “they are institutionalizing it.”