Southwest will end practice of overbooking, CEO says
Southwest Airlines will end its practice of overbooking, the carrier's CEO said Thursday morning.
“The company has made the decision that we’ll cease to overbook going forward,” Southwest chief Gary Kelly said while discussing the company’s quarterly earnings on CNBC. “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 … .”
Kelly gave that answer when asked if the airline industry should reconsider the practice after the subject became a hot topic in the wake of United’s passenger-dragging incident earlier this month.
“I think that’s an airline-by-airline decision. I’ll speak for Southwest Airlines,” he said to CNBC. “We overbook very, very modestly today. The reason we overbook is to try to fill empty seats. To the extent we’re able to do that, we’re able to keep the rest of our fares lower.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/southwest-will-end-practice-of-overbooking-ceo-says/ar-BBArK8R?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=edgsp
