Last year’s stories of thousands of passengers being denied boarding on flights they had booked apparently made an impression and taught the airlines a lesson–they bumped fewer passengers last quarter than any time since 1995, when records were first kept.
The 2016 bumping crisis got big publicity not only because of the 12,000 bumped passengers in the summer quarter (compared to 2,745 this year), but because some of the bumps involved horrifying videos of passengers being dragged off planes. After that bad publicity, airline after airline swore it would do better.
This year’s summer figure amounted to 1.5 passengers out of every 100,000; last year it was 6.9 per 100,000, according to the Transportation Department’s Bureau of Statistics. This year’s spring quarter briefly held the low-bump record at 4.4 per 100,000.
The biggest bumpers include some of the budget carriers—Spirit, Frontier and Southwest, while those with the lowest rates were Delta, Virgin America, JetBlue and United.
