Hotels, airlines, car rentals, etc all book with potential for overage. Trips change, get cancelled, etc, and they have carefully crafted formulas to maximize revenue/occupancy/etc. Business traveller regularly change flights do to schedule changes, etc. The airlines are going to account for those fluctuations.
Typically, they find takers for the free travel dollars, but even their max $$ in this case was only $800. That’s barely enough to cover a vacation for 2. They should have raised the level vs. demanding fliers off the plane (even before the unnecessary use of force). Someone would have responded to $1000+ a free 1st class upgrade...surely. All this to accommodate their employees, too. That’s the worst part of it. If they had simply too many paying customers, that’s one thing, but the sure disregard for customers over employees flying to the destination is utterly impossible to comprehend.
Except airlines have a need to move people around from hub to hub. It’s not clear to me whether this was an emergency that these employees had been stranded by mechanical failure or weather and they had to get to Louisville for their first flight the next day, or if it was employees f’ing around and taking up paying seats. I really thought deadheading employees were the lowest priority to be seated. I’d be surprised, but not shocked, to find out I was wrong.
True (re: overage all thruout travel industry). But, as one blogger pointed out, you don't see a prominent hotel chain dragging a guy out of a room ("re-accommodate") in order to accommodate a hotel industry sales exec who just arrived & needs a room.
The airline industry expects travelers to plan their trips down to a "T"; they better do it themselves w/plans and contingency plans as to how they are going to shuttle their team members around...and this should be easiest to do when it comes to their Hub HQ city.