plate 02No-shows2026-08-05
plate 02 · 爽约
No-shows
Reserved capacity is held free of charge for people who may not appear, so the cost of their absence lands on the operator.
Who pays for the seat that was promised and then abandoned?
you are in this shape if
- Reservations are free to make and free to break
- You turn real demand away to protect promises that evaporate
- Absence rates are stable enough to predict but you eat them anyway
the moves
- Oversell to the statistics
- Sell more than capacity by the predicted absence rate, and pre-arrange a buy-back (compensation, rebooking) for the overflow days.
- Make the promise cost something
- Prepayment or deposits convert a reservation from a free option into a purchase; the absence problem becomes the customer's.
- Close the loop before the deadline
- Reminders and easy cancellation recover capacity while it can still be resold.
where it was solved
- 1978US airlinesAviationEconomist Julian Simon proposed in a 1968 note in the Journal of Transport Economics and Policy that when a flight is oversold, an agent should pass out bid forms asking each passenger the lowest cash payment they'd accept to take a later flight, then buy out the cheapest bidders instead of forcibly bumping whoever happened to be last in line. The Civil Aeronautics Board's 1978 rulemaking built this into federal regulation, requiring airlines to solicit volunteers before involuntarily denying anyone boarding.The 1978 CAB rule requiring airlines to request volunteers before bumping, paired with higher compensation caps, is credited with driving down involuntary denied-boarding rates over the following decades; by the 2010s the rate has generally run under 1 per 10,000 passengers, though the exact trajectory in the years immediately after 1978 is not precisely documented in the sources reviewed here.
- 2011Next / TockRestaurantsNick Kokonas sold restaurant seats as prepaid tickets like theatre, then productised it as Tock in 2014.No-show rates collapsed from double digits to low single digits, and deposits became normal at high-end restaurants worldwide.
- 2016NHS clinicsHealthcareSMS reminder programmes and opt-out rebooking against missed outpatient appointments ('DNAs'), which cost the NHS hundreds of millions a year.Trials repeatedly show reminder systems cutting missed appointments by roughly a quarter.
what breaks in transit
- Overselling without a genuine buy-back auction ends with security dragging a paying customer off the plane — United, 2017.
- Deposits deter exactly the marginal first-time customer in markets where trust in the operator is low.
- Punishing no-shows publicly turns a statistics problem into a customer-relations problem.