When flights are overbooked, it’s not uncommon for airlines to seek volunteers to take a later flight in exchange for some sort of compensation. That compensation could be money, a travel voucher, frequent flyer points or perhaps an upgrade on the later flight.

For many people, getting bumped to a later flight is hugely inconvenient – for a variety of reasons. So, the compensation offer should be generous enough to persuade enough people to change their travel plans at the last minute and potentially give up hours of their valuable time.

With huge demand for travel but limited capacity in recent months, many airlines have been over-selling flights lately. Some Australian Frequent Flyer members have been offered thousands of dollars to take a flight the next day or change to an indirect routing on another airline.

With this in mind, the compensation offer apparently made to passengers on a recent overbooked Virgin Australia flight was so inadequate that it’s almost hilarious.

Virgin Australia’s overbooked Cairns-Brisbane flight

The problems began when Virgin Australia discovered there were fewer seats available on a recent Boeing 737 flight from Cairns to Brisbane than the number of booked passengers.

Australian Frequent Flyer understands that this flight was not commercially overbooked. In other words, Virgin Australia did not deliberately sell more seats than it expected to have available. However, due to operational reasons, Virgin had to swap the operating aircraft at short notice to another plane that happened to have one less row of seats. A passenger also suspects that some extra passengers may have been moved onto that flight from an earlier delayed service.

Virgin Australia’s newer Boeing 737-800 aircraft with Boeing Sky Interiors have 168 Economy Class seats. The older Boeing 737-800s (one of which operated this Cairns-Brisbane flight) have 162 Economy seats.

It appears that the overbooking issue wasn’t picked up until the flight had already boarded.

According to AFF member esquire, who was on the flight, the cabin manager asked if any passengers would volunteer to be offloaded after they were already on board. Apparently, there were some passengers with onward connections that they were unable to find seats for.

140 Velocity points offered as compensation

So, what were the crew offering in exchange for the inconvenience of getting off the plane and taking another flight three hours later? Just 140 Velocity Frequent Flyer points!

140 Velocity points would be worth between 70 cents and around $3, depending on how they’re spent. That’s hardly adequate compensation, so it’s not surprising that nobody accepted the offer.

According to esquire, this is what happened next:

As you would expect no one budged. Crew appeared flustered. Then we waited another 10 minutes then the captain came on asking, reiterating the generous offer of points and at least one passenger really needs to travel to Newcastle today and it is only a few hours if they have no urgency to get home!
They must have been important!

So now the flight is 35 minutes late and a passenger reminded crew that they also have connecting flights which they will miss in Brisbane if they don’t take off soon (including me). Not sure if someone swapped over but if you are serious about compensating off loaded passenger make a serious offer. 
Made my connecting flight by 5 minutes.

The most likely scenario is that this was a misunderstanding, and that the crew meant to offer compensation worth a lot more than 140 Velocity points.

In cases of overbooking, Virgin Australia normally offers a Travel Bank credit to passengers who voluntarily offload. Perhaps they meant to offer a $140 voucher, which still doesn’t really compensate sufficiently for the inconvenience but would be much better than 140 points.

Alternatively, perhaps Virgin meant to offer compensation of 140 status credits or 14,000 Velocity points. Those would have also been much fairer offers.

Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Overbooked flight – laughable compensation offered to be offloaded

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.