There was an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune / New York Times last week about how airlines are applying more analytics into the area of avoiding overbooking – leading to “bumping” of passengers off the flight. As a business traveller who seems to suffer this on occasions (apparently the solution is – where you can – to check in online as early as possible) I can appreciate any reduction in such deliberate service level reductions by the airlines.
Interestingly the article quotes one of the those people who exploits such poor airline service by deliberately booking on likely overbooked flights, just to volunteer to be bumped (with associated benefits). Perhaps the event-driven approach to solving these overbooking conundrums might be to track the flight bookings by these “Professional Bumpees” – if they are booked on a flight, then the airline needs to take care over overbooking!
Of course, if you starting avoiding bumping the professional bumpees, then they will soon fail to be a good indicator of your overbooking status…
In addition, of course, analytics are only a guideline based on “past events”. What you really want is to embed those “smarts” (knowledge based on experience) with the reactive “smarts” (CEP) that let you respond optimally to new situations – such as weather, aircraft maintenance, or even volcanic events!
