Why Stranded Airline Passengers Don’t Get to Go Home First
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iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — If you’re one of the more than 400,000 travelers who were displaced by the snowstorm that hit the Northeast this week, you might think you’ll have first priority when planes start flying again.
But you would be wrong.
Flight operations, according to flight tracking site FlightAware, are likely to resume Wednesday. Only 465 U.S. flights have been cancelled so far for Wednesday, while more than 10 times that number — 4,699 — have been cancelled for Tuesday.
But the people who are most likely to fly first are the ones who are actually ticketed for Wednesday. All the stranded passengers will have to fill whatever empty seats are available.
So why not bump the people who are ticketed for the coming days in an effort to help those who have been displaced get home faster? The answer is pretty straightforward.
“Doing so would inconvenience both the people who were stranded and the people with flights that aren’t cancelled,” said George Hobica, CEO of Airfarewatchdog.com. “Why piss off two passengers when you can only do one?”
There are quite a few angry people taking to Twitter to vent their airline sagas.
JetBlue said that it “automatically rebook[s] customers on the next available flight” when there’s a cancellation. The airline, as well as other domestic carriers, do allow passengers to change their itinerary online if the original re-booking isn’t satisfactory.
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