How Data Analytics Can Solve the Airline Overbooking Problem?

By admin, 20 June 2017

It is interesting to see how data analytics helps solve real business problems, and its benefits extends to a wide range of industries. Consider the airlines industry, which has been facing flak because of frequent instances of overbooked flights and is consequently looking for better ways to intelligently handle such scenarios without affecting an airline’s brand image.

Currently airlines are known to use factors like price paid for a ticket and passengers’ frequent flier status into account to decide which passengers to eject from an overbooked flight. An analysis of passengers’ past travel data can enable airlines make intelligent decisions in the event of overbooked flights, in ways that reduce the overall impact or eliminate the need for involuntary passenger bumping.

Data transparency can also help airlines eliminate passenger bumping and create scenarios where passengers voluntarily decide to get bumped and ultimately end up being happy to be a part of the decision-making process, hence positively impacting the brand.

Moshe Kranc’s article with VentureBeat shares light on how “Involuntary passenger bumping is actually a data problem that can be solved quite easily via improvements in data analytics and data transparency.”