Southwest to stop overbooking flights

by Nikita Vladimirov - 04/27/17 3:39 PM ET

The CEO of Southwest Airlines said Thursday that the airline will be stopping the practice of overbooking flights in the future.

“We are seriously reconsidering that practice. And … the company has made the decision that we’ll cease to overbook going forward,” Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said during an interview with CNBC.

{mosads}“We’ve been taking steps over the last several years to prepare ourselves for this anyway. We never like to have a situation where we we’re oversold … at least for us its something that we will be discontinuing here very shortly,” he added.

Southwest’s decision comes weeks after United Airlines drew widespread criticism for forcibly removing one of its passengers from a flight to give his seat to a United employee.

“Southwest is changing our policy and will no longer book flights over capacity as part of the selling process,” Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King told USA Today.

“As we have dramatically improved our forecasting tools and techniques, and as we approach the upcoming implementation of our new reservations system on May 9, we no longer have a need to overbook as part of the revenue management inventory process.”

The new measure, however, does not mean that airplanes will never be over capacity.

According to King, occasional “operational challenges will have our airport-based employees asking for volunteers, but that will happen much less frequently because overbooking to customers in advance will be off the table as a consideration.”

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