When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time.

A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves money or effort it's no problem if notifications are delayed 30s.

Does the fact that an airline booking system must be perfect explain why so many flights are overbooked or cancelled?

Especially for a free service!

Think about other ad-supported sites. If you're an engineer working on an ad-supported product, the perfect consistency you strive for in your code is not the product. The product is the sum of all of the content the user sees. And the costs of the tradeoffs you make are paid for by ads.

Am I willing to see 10x more ads for perfect consistency? Definitely not.

No, overbooking is a business decision justified by the fact that, statistically, not all passengers will actually show up for their flight, and lower load factors cost money.

It's funny because from my experience airline systems are very imperfect (timing wise).

I (unwisely) tried to purchase an Icelandair ticket via the Chase travel portal. I would get a reservation number, go buy seats on Icelandair's website, and a few days later the entire reservation would vanish into the ether. Rinse and repeat 3x.

I can't remember the exact verbiage, but basically tickets can be "reserved" and "booked". One means the ticket is allocated, and one means the ticket is actually paid for. I eventually sat on the phone with an executive support person as they booked the ticket and got it all the way through. It turns out Chase reserves a ticket on an airline but as an SLA of ~3 days to actually pay for the ticket. Icelandair's requires a ticket to be paid with in 24 hours, so it was timing out.

What is the "no show" rate?

A 2019 study of 5 European airports in 2019 had no-show rates of 14.4%: https://www.ozion-airport.com/product/comparative-analysis-n...

However, my understanding is that airlines have much more sophisticated per-flight and per-passenger models that calculate the predicted no-show factor based on the historical rates for that particular route (e.g. you're more likely to get more no-shows in business class flying from NYC to SF compared to holiday travelers with a reservation on the Florida Keys)

I think you'll have to pay a team millions to figure that out, it is unlikely to be a static rate but rather decided based on multiple traits like time of year, time of flight, distance of flight, cost of ticket, etc.

That blows my mind, I would expect maybe 1 or 2 passengers per plane at most. I'm trying to think of what factors would cause that many no-shows, it has to be mostly missed connections?

I can't imagine spending hundreds of dollars and just not showing up.

A friend of mine works for a Management Consultancy firm and they have full flex tickets if they miss the 8pm flight home they can take the next one or fly back the next morning. All without additional fees. So I believe business travel is the biggest factor when it comes to missed flights.

Side note: His employer is the biggest client of a major European airline.

Delays getting to the airport and missing the plane. Cancelations with full refund. "Hidden city" ticketing. Layover delays. Businesses booking blocks. Flexible flights ( https://www.travelperk.com/guides/flexible-travel/flexible-f... ). Changing / rebooking flights for an earlier or later time.

I'm sure other factors such as sudden illness and migrateable tickets make a sizeable chunk too.

Keep in mind they sell a lot of tickets where one of the features that allows for a premium price is that they allow late cancellations or changes to other flights. Holiday travelers are pretty "reliable", but business travelers might have changed needs at the drop of a hat (say you meet another prospective client on a business trip and decide to stay another day to fit in a face-to-face meeting).

Miscommunication leads to bad outcomes. One missed message out of order could easily lead to a fight, a lawsuit, a flash mob, threats of violence - that then need to be taken seriously, swatting, DOXxing, etc...

Msg 1: I hate ___insert_controversal_person_category_here___

Msg 2: Is the kind of statement that really sets me off

Msg 1 has a very different meaning if you don't see Msg 2.

This can already happen without help from the platform.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the platform should make it worse.

Trying to have a conversation on flaky platform is hell.

No additional fees, but the cost of the ticket is typically sky-high. In many cases the company could purchase 3 restricted-fare tickets for less than the unrestricted fare. (And also, the consultants want to get home, they HATE staying extra nights, so they have inherent motivation to catch the original flight). You'd think that management consulting firms, you know, who are supposed to be good at optimization and reducing costs, would have figured this out.

... or perhaps they prioritize ensuring their consultants feel like they're being looked after - replacing them when they find another job is very expensive.

> airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies)

The slack just gets moved. Airlines oversell by about 8 percent. All systems need some slack in them. Isn't that kinda Bob's Law or something?

What part of my comment suggests consultants aren't "looked after?" The idea that the consultants' personal time is so low on the scale of priorities that the company prefers to pay 3x or 4x for plane tickets to ensure they are available to spend extra time with clients, rather than their families, suggests that the company is specifically NOT looking after the consultants' well-being.

They aren’t following the same rules as you, they’re on negotiated rates/agreements.

(Replying to both you and the parent poster)

Airlines are far from perfect. They overbook flights and sometimes have to ask people leave and pay them for the inconvenience. My wife and I once got $1000 a piece and a hotel and food voucher to volunteer to take a flight the next day on a layover in Atlanta.

As far as your particular situation, the number one rule of using a third party portal to book flights or hotels is - don’t.

I understand that Iceland Air is not a transfer partner of Chase. But even in that case, I would just wait to use my points until I could use a transfer partner.

On the earning side if paying cash, the difference between 2x/3x points when booking directly and 5x when going through the portal just isn’t worth the risk.

Yeah, replace consultants with clients in that comment and you’ll have the right of it.

That the consultants' personal time is high on the scale is why they pay for the flex-fare tickets. So you miss an 8pm flight for one reason or another - it happens, so "don't miss the flight" isn't a valid retort.

Do I feel better taken care of if I can just take the following morning's flight at no additional cost or hassle, or if I now need to contact someone at Amex Global Business Travel, have them try to get me on a flight, have another expense, potentially not be able to get on the next flight or the one after that, etc.

* A massive bulk of flex rates is different price than a single flex ticket

* when I travelled to a single city with 20+ colleagues for several years, our nightly hotel rate was less than quarter of published rate. I don't think we got anything like that on Airlines, but nevertheless, bulk gets discounts.

* I forget details but between specific frequent cities which had hourly flights, we had full flexibility and we used this all the time. So we might catch a flight hour earlier if there was one available, or hour later if need be than booked.

Basically to everybody's point, business travel is very different than vacation travel and intuition from once a year personal trip don't apply.

The airline has literally all of the data on this, they definitely do not have to pay a team millions.

They have figured it out, the client is paying for it.

The company can start with heavily-discounted restricted tickets and eat them when a consultant needs to extend the trip. Today it's even easier because airlines have eliminated change fees - so essentially any ticket can be canceled and those funds credited to a future flight. It's all still "no cost or hassle" to the consultant since they aren't paying for the flights to begin with.

This is actually the most sensible response

They probably do pay millions of dollars in wages for business analysts to figure out what this rate is on their flights.

* Hotels are required by law to have a published "rack rate" and it's common for both leisure and business travelers to book at more than half, or more, off those rates. Airlines don't have that.

* Yes of course there are negotiated discounts for major corporations- but full flexibility is still far more expensive than restricted tickets, just like business is still far more expensive than economy.

* Most airlines offer guaranteed same-day changes, or at least priority standby, to high-status loyalty members (which most consultants are) so buying full-flex tickets to get an hour earlier/later flexibility is redundant - basically, paying for a benefit you already have.

Overbooking is not a mistake, though. People miss flights for many reasons, and the airlines predict this with impressive accuracy, to the point that they can afford to pay tremendous sums for being wrong and yet still come out ahead.

Remember lots of business travelers have connections or flex schedules. When I had to go to the West coast for business, I usually have full fare tickets and book a later flight. If I had flexibility, I’d switch to an earlier plane or first class.

> You'd think that management consulting firms, you know, who are supposed to be good at optimization and reducing costs, would have figured this out.

Maybe they've figured out that enabling their employees to stay a few extra hours without worry to finish a deal is worth it.

Similar reasons people buy overnight sleeper tickets from the west coast to asia for sky-high prices. That person has to be there, and they have to be rested. If they are negotiating 100m+ dollar contracts its a no-brainer.

> afford to pay tremendous sums for being wrong

Or they can just haul you forcefully from the flight you paid for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...

This is ridiculous. There must have been some amount of money that would have convinced four people to deplane voluntarily. $800 was ridiculously low.

Vast majority of consultants are working on engagements where "the deal" was negotiated weeks/months earlier.

The goal isn't to eliminate flexibility, it's understanding probabilities. If fully-flexible/refundable flights are 3x the fare of restricted, then in aggregate, the company could have a chunk of consultants throw out their original reservations and rebook later flights, and still save money. Yes- sometimes consultants need to stay longer than planned, but in an age of prioritizing "work-life balance," most consultants are encouraged to stick to their schedule and get back home when originally planned.

Intercontinental business-class tickets have a tangible benefit, guaranteed lie-down seat and relaxing accommodations that enable rest, as you correctly point out. Flexible airline tickets have no tangible benefit, it is simply risk mitigation (avoiding wasting a nonrefundable ticket if a person can't make a flight) and like other risk-mitigation products such as insurance, extended warranties, car rental protection, etc, it is priced so that the cost exceeds the benefit.

And as stated elsewhere, the majority of consultants are relatively junior people whose role has nothing to do with negotiating contracts.

They probably just have an SSRS report that prints out in a few dozen offices automatically on some schedule.

I'm not trying to be pedantic but this is table stakes stuff. I know we're supposed to shy away from saying things like this but compared to the other engineering that airlines have to do, this is easy. It costs - at most, including wages - a few tens of thousands of dollars yearly to come up with these figures. It's a fraction of the salary of one United Airlines BA.[0] This cost might go up if one of the senior developers convinces their boss that this needs to be a machine learning model but unless they're resume pumping it's going to be at most PCA and a regression.

This is not a team of people working for months on this one thing.

[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/analyst-revenue-manage...

Case in point! Imagine how much United(Express) settled this for.

European airports in 2019: A lot of these would be 10 euro Ryanair/Easyjet/Whatever flights, probably.

(The really ultra cheap Ryanair flights are less of a thing now, but in 2019 they were very much a factor)