Delta says bumping rules not needed, touts its own record

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday that selling more tickets than seats is a valid industry practice to keep planes full, but added airlines need to do a good job managing when customers are occasionally denied flights.

As officials threaten to legislate overbookings, Bastian said Delta is nearly 10 times better at denying boarding involuntarily to its passengers than airlines that advertise they don’t overbook. He didn’t name an airline, but JetBlue advertises about not overbooking.

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Delta denied boarding involuntarily to 1,238 passengers last year out of 129 million, or about one in 100,000 passengers. That rate improved from the 1,938 passengers denied boarding in 2015 and contributed to improvements across the industry that resulted in the lowest rate of boarding denials last year since the Transportation Department began tracking the statistics in 1995.

Delta was second in the lowest denied-boarding rates last year to Hawaiian Airlines. For comparison, JetBlue involuntarily denied boarding to 0.92 of every 10,000 passengers.

Among the largest airlines, United Airlines denied boarding to 0.43 passengers out of 10,000 last year, American Airlines to 0.64 out of 10,000 and Southwest Airlines 0.99 out of 10,000.

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“At Delta we have done a very, very good job of managing our overbookings,” Bastian told investors and reporters on an earnings call. “Interestingly, when you compare to some airlines out there that actually advertise they don’t overbook, and our numbers are 10 times better in terms of involuntary denied bookings than some of the airlines that advertise that they don’t overbook, but clearly do in terms of having involuntary denials.”

Overbooking drew the spotlight this week after United Airlines had police drag a passenger off a flight Sunday at Chicago’s O’Hare airport because the plane was full and the airline needed four crew members to board.

Because United operates more than 70% of the flights at Newark, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie urged the U.S. Transportation Department on Tuesday to prohibit airlines from overbooking their flights. Members of Congress are also mulling legislation to prevent overbooking.

“This conduct is abusive and outrageous," Christie said.

But Bastian said the industry doesn’t need new regulations or state or federal laws. The 1978 federal law that deregulated the industry generally blocked regulation of how airlines market routes, fares and services.

“I don’t think we need to have additional legislation to try to control how airlines run their business in this space,” Bastian said. “The key is managing it before you get to the boarding process. That’s what our team has done in a very effective and efficient job over.”

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