Giving up your seat on an overbooked flight can be an easy way to make a few hundred dollars. But only if you do it exactly right.
Airlines are well known for overbooking flights. Their justification is that a certain number of passengers are likely to be no-shows, so instead of letting the seats go empty, they’ll book “extra” people onto the flight and they’ll fill in those empty spaces. It’s great from the airlines’ point of view, since full flights mean more money in their coffers.
However, if they’ve booked more people than there are seats and there aren’t any “no shows” – or if fewer people don’t show up than they anticipate, it means either bumping some passengers from the flight, or getting volunteers to take a later flight.
Years ago, my husband and I used such an opportunity to be voluntarily bumped from an oversold flight on American Airlines, but how it happened was an unusual circumstance. Regardless, the experience of trying to use the voucher American gave us was, well, less than ideal.
Regardless of our experience, if an airline offers a nice amount to voluntarily get put on a later flight, lots of people are willing to take the airline up on it. Even more so when the airline ups the ante ;-).
A young man apparently was in that very situation not long ago, but he made a simple mistake and it caused him to lose out on the offer.
The story was on Reddit, and written by the young man’s parent. They said they had bought a flight for their 18-year-old son to return to college after winter break. He was scheduled to connect from MSP to GFK, but the flight was overbooked by two seats. The airline asked for volunteers to give up their seats in exchange for a $600 credit.
He agreed, especially since he had a friend in Minneapolis who could pick him up and drive him to Grand Forks instead.
However, the promised credit never appeared in his account. He later submitted a complaint via email and received a response that didn’t seem to make sense and appeared almost AI-generated. The airline claimed he was not at the gate and therefore not eligible for the credit.
According to him, that wasn’t true—he was at the gate when the announcement was made, and at least one other passenger also volunteered.
In hindsight, his parent advised that he should never give up a seat without written confirmation from a gate agent. But the situation remained unresolved, and they were now trying to determine if there was any way to recover the credit he was promised.
Some of you who fly often already know the answer to this – the young man’s mistake was leaving the gate before the flight departed.
Another flyer, u/Historical_Terms2454, explained the situation:
When you do this, you have to wait at the gate until the flight departs, then the gate agent will issue the voucher. The reason for this is because they want to be sure there aren’t any no-shows. If someone didn’t show up, then you son would’ve gotten a seat, and it wouldn’t have been a oversell.
If he just left the airport without waiting, then he loses the voucher.
Someone else, u/schubox63, further explained:
This happened to me and my wife but it was an American flight. We gave up our seats, and then they had two no shows so they put us back on the flight.
Other flyers shared similar stories. And u/wastedpixis gave these words of advice:
On other airlines, I have put in for this and they say “don’t board the plane, stay here and if we are full the voucher is yours. If we aren’t full you’ll have a seat and hop on the flight”
Also, if they have to bump you, they owe you a lot of money, cash, so I always try to get them to get close to that number when they ask. “We’re offering $300”. When nobody goes up, I go up and say, “my number is $900 if you don’t want to keep asking for volunteers”. I’ve had a few immediately call to check with management and it always comes back as a “sure”.
It’s good advice and a learned lesson
It’s a simple mistake—and an easy one to make if you don’t know how the process works.
But when it comes to airline compensation, timing matters.
If you ever volunteer to give up your seat, don’t go anywhere until the gate agent tells you to. Because if the flight ends up not being full after all, you could find yourself back on the plane…or walking away with nothing.
And just like that, what should’ve been an easy $600 turns into a very expensive lesson.
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