Don’t Get Dao-ed: How To Tell If Your United Flight Might Be Overbooked

Don’t Get Dao-ed: How To Tell If Your United Flight Might Be Overbooked

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Overbooked flights happen all the time on all three of the legacy carriers. Most of the time these issues resolve themselves naturally and passengers are never the wiser. Some folks will cancel their ticket, no-show, or switch to a different flight. Sadly, others will misconnect. In all of these cases, nothing needs to be done as the problem will solve itself.

Sometimes, however, the oversold situation persists and there are literally more passengers in the gate area than the flight can accommodate. When this happens, the agent solicits volunteers willing to take a later flight in exchange for compensation. In rare cases where they get no takers, they may have to involuntarily deny boarding (IDB) to someone.

Once in a blue moon, all of this will break down and they’ll try to deny someone boarding who has already boarded. As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s exactly what happened to Dr. Dao on his United flight from Chicago to Louisville. We all know how how that ended.

As a result of that incident, there is a lot of interest right now in knowing whether a flight is overbooked or not, particularly for those who are flying United. It’s not that anyone should worry about getting the Dao treatment — I’m fairly certain that will never happen again — but it can be helpful to know if a flight is likely to need volunteers or whether you should be concerned about the slight possibility of being denied boarding.

And it turns out, United makes quite a bit of data publicly available.

The United app is really good

If you’re flying United, you should really have the United app installed on your phone.

United has arguably the best app of any of the legacy airlines, both for the amount of information it conveys and for the number of tasks you can do with it. But rather than fully review the app, I’m just going to focus on using it to tell whether your flight is possibly overbooked.

United App Welcome

To check the status of your flight, you’ll first want to search for it, either by city pair, or flight number. Or if you’re logged into your account, it might appear in the My Flights area.

Note that you can view flights up to two days in advance (or in the past), and anyone can do this whether you are flying or not.

United App Flight Search

Once you have the flight, you’ll want to go over to the standby tab. This shows a list of the people who are hoping to get on your flight but are not yet confirmed on it. As such, their presence doesn’t really impact you.

But at the top of that screen, you’ll see that it shows the booking status of each of the cabins. For First, Economy, and possibly Business, it’ll show Full or Available depending on whether the cabin is booked to capacity or not. This is intended to help the standby passengers estimate their chances of getting on the flight, but you can use it as a quick check of whether the plane is full.

Here’s a flight from Chicago to Denver for Thursday April 27.

United App ORD DEN

If all of the cabins show Full, then you can be pretty well assured the plane is at least booked to capacity. It might be booked even, meaning there are exactly as many confirmed passengers as there are seats, or it might be overbooked — you can’t really tell.

What if only one cabin shows as full?

The standby screen shows the booking status of each cabin on the plane, and each one is basically independent. For example, the economy cabin can show full while the first class cabin might show as available. In this case, the economy cabin is booked to capacity (or oversold) while there is still space in first.

Here’s a flight from Denver to Colorado Springs which is full in economy but has space in first.

United App DEN COS Standby

Since we don’t know the exact booking status of either of the cabins, we can’t say whether the entire plane is booked to capacity. That’s because the economy cabin could be overbooked by one, while there is one seat available in first.

Even though economy is technically overbooked, the situation will naturally resolve itself when United upgrades a passenger from economy to first. If economy was overbooked by two, however, and first only had space for one, there might be an issue.

What does the seat map for a flight tell us?

The seat map can also be an imperfect, yet still useful, indicator of the booking status. And the app shows a live, real-time view of the seat map, exactly as the United agents see it, which is really cool.

The key to understanding the seat map is to realize that it is probably underestimating the load of the flight. That’s because there are often some passengers who are confirmed on the flight but don’t yet have seat assignments. So even if there are empty seats showing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the flight still has space.

Here’s the seat map for the Chicago to Denver flight that I searched for above. I couldn’t fit the entire seat map on the screen at once, so this is just the Economy Plus section — regular economy was completely full.

United App ORD DEN seat map

On the other hand, if the seat map shows every seat occupied, you can be fairly sure that just about every seat really is occupied.

There are some exceptions to this, however. On pretty much all flights, United blocks a couple seats at the front of economy for special needs passengers. On narrowbody mainline aircraft, that is almost always the aisle and middle seats on the left hand side of the first row of economy, which happens to be the bulkhead. These don’t get released until 24 hours prior to departure which means they’ll show as occupied even though they probably aren’t yet. Within 24 hours, anyone can select them.

Here’s the seat map for a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles in January 2018 from the United website. Seats 7D and 7E show as available, but are most likely just blocked and will become available at check-in.

UnitedSeatMapShowingBlockedSeats

Another reason that the seat map isn’t the best indicator of the load is because United treats Economy Plus as a separate cabin for seat selection purposes.

Premium members from the Gold level on up — Gold, Platinum, 1K, and Global Services — can select an Economy Plus seat at any time. But Silvers can only select them at check-in, and of course general members have to pay for them. As a result, United tends to overfill the regular economy section, knowing that Silvers will move up to Economy Plus within 24 hours, thus freeing up seats. And then if there are still not enough regular economy seats available, they’ll hand out economy plus seats to anyone.

So it’s not uncommon to see a flight where the standby screen shows full in both the economy and first cabins, yet there are a ton of Economy Plus seats available. In this case, the regular economy section is overfilled — note how I’m not calling it overbooked, because for booking purposes, there’s just one economy cabin — and United is expecting a lot of passengers to move to Economy Plus, either at check-in if they are Silvers, or at the gate when the agent starts handing out free Economy Plus seats to those who still don’t have a seat assignment.

Bottom Line

The United app is really a fantastic tool and makes a lot of data publicly available. If you understand what you are looking at, you can often infer a lot about the booking status of your flight. No, it won’t tell you for sure if a flight is oversold, but you can get a pretty good idea as to whether it is booked to capacity or not. To tell if it’s really oversold, you have to ask a United agent as only they can see that information.

Finally, everything I’ve explained here is specific to United.

So while some of the general concepts may apply to other airlines, the details may be much different. And, in my experience, very few airlines make as much data available to the public as United.

Do you use the United app to determine the booking status of your flight?

Conversations (15)
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  1. julie Guest

    Pretty sure Dao staged this, telling a relative he was about to get paid. Click-bait by using his name. Shame on you, not on United. Jerks like this make me want to take the train.

  2. Michael Owen Guest

    Dr. Dao's flight was not overbooked. You know better than to say otherwise.

    Must Ride crew showed up at the last minute. They didn't have 3 seats left, so they removed Dao according the established boarding priority.

  3. Ang Guest

    I have been trying to predict and use this exact method for some time, which I actually had planned for this thanksgiving weekend. It's kind of a gamble sometimes, but I'd like to feel like an advantage player in some regards. I haven't used it woth expertflyer, but rather with my teaching schedule limiting me to fly at peak times paying peak prices, I always volunteer. I'd like to watch you tube and check out expert flyer.

  4. kelly Guest

    How can I flight which flights (routing and dates) are the most common to be bumped? So if I need to buy (or use coupon) an extra flight/ticket. ( eg.maybe I should buy it for Christmas eve from LAX to NY.)

  5. A Guest

    Expertflyer.com is much better and easier to use. However I've noticed some airlines intentionally zeroing out all fare classes some time before departure, even if the flight is half full.

  6. AlexS Diamond

    @Chris: Go take a look at ExpertFlyer.com. Poke around YouTube for videos on how to use it. I believe under Awards you can see every single flight on a route with availability by fare code. ExpertFlyer's $100/year, but if you manage to get VDB'd it's more than paid for itself.

    In fact... go back to the early years of this blog. Lucky did this A LOT on United back in the day and profited quite...

    @Chris: Go take a look at ExpertFlyer.com. Poke around YouTube for videos on how to use it. I believe under Awards you can see every single flight on a route with availability by fare code. ExpertFlyer's $100/year, but if you manage to get VDB'd it's more than paid for itself.

    In fact... go back to the early years of this blog. Lucky did this A LOT on United back in the day and profited quite handsomely from it. I'll admit to intentionally booking flights with the highest chance of getting VDB'd when my schedule has room in it, especially with Delta since they handle this so well. $400/seat to arrive at my destination 2 hours later? Sure.

  7. Josh G Guest

    Is this a joke? Inventory and availability are two different things plus the operational complexities involved at day of departure. The only way to know for sure is to work for UA and check loads real time. Even their nonrev support desk doesn't like sharing detailed loads with OAL non-rev ID-90 travelers who list through myIDTravel, so it's not like revenue pax absent from maybe nagging a PCE or res agent until
    they oblige and disclose against policy.

  8. a9504477 Guest

    There is no need for the app. You can check the same information on UA's website.

  9. Sam Guest

    @John That's only the case if United actually blocks the seats in first. A flight could easily be slightly overbooked in economy but they're still willing to sell seats in both cabins to actually overbook the flight. In that case, you won't see seats blocked in first even though economy might be overbooked by exactly the number of first seats open.

  10. Travis OMAAT

    John -- That makes sense. I have seen the (+4 blocked) and hadn't known exactly how to interpret that. Thanks.

  11. John Member

    Travis -- This is a good post, but inaccurate in one respect: If *either* first *or* economy shows availability on the stand-by tab, that generally means the flight is not over-sold. On the app, first-class will show up as full if all of the first-class seats potentially could be needed to accommodate economy passengers due to an oversold situation.

    You can confirm this by checking the upgrades tab. On that tab, United will show the...

    Travis -- This is a good post, but inaccurate in one respect: If *either* first *or* economy shows availability on the stand-by tab, that generally means the flight is not over-sold. On the app, first-class will show up as full if all of the first-class seats potentially could be needed to accommodate economy passengers due to an oversold situation.

    You can confirm this by checking the upgrades tab. On that tab, United will show the number of first-class seats that are "booked" (which includes both people who actually booked a first-class ticket and everyone who has already been upgraded to first class). On some flights, United will also show that a certain number of first-class seats are "blocked.". For example, if first class capacity is 20, you might see, in the "booked" row, "15 (+4 blocked).". On long international flights, one seat in first or business may be blocked for pilot rest, but if multiple seats are blocked, it's because economy is oversold. If first-class is not showing "full" on the upgrades tab, they'll be able to accommodate everyone because even if all the coach passengers show up, they can just upgrade folks and they'll still have at least one seat left in first-class for an upgrade.

    Hence, you're only facing a risk of an over-sold situation if *all* cabins are listed as full. Even in that case, they might be fine because the flight could just be at capacity.

  12. Imperator Diamond

    For a seven figure settlement I would gladly get dao'ed.

  13. Brad B Guest

    Travis you forgot to mention how you can look at the upgrade tab and see how many people are booked in first and business and how many are checked in, which can also be used to estimate the load. If there is only 1 seat available in F but Y is showing full it is safe to assume the flight is at capacity or oversold.

  14. Chris Guest

    I wonder how easy it would be to scrape this data. Seems like you could use it to compile a database from which you may be able to infer which flights were overbooked. If you wanted to, say, increase your chance of receiving a VDB voucher, that would be useful info.

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julie Guest

Pretty sure Dao staged this, telling a relative he was about to get paid. Click-bait by using his name. Shame on you, not on United. Jerks like this make me want to take the train.

0
Michael Owen Guest

Dr. Dao's flight was not overbooked. You know better than to say otherwise. Must Ride crew showed up at the last minute. They didn't have 3 seats left, so they removed Dao according the established boarding priority.

0
Ang Guest

I have been trying to predict and use this exact method for some time, which I actually had planned for this thanksgiving weekend. It's kind of a gamble sometimes, but I'd like to feel like an advantage player in some regards. I haven't used it woth expertflyer, but rather with my teaching schedule limiting me to fly at peak times paying peak prices, I always volunteer. I'd like to watch you tube and check out expert flyer.

0
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