For years now, I've been advising a colleague that trying to make sense of airfares is a nearly impossible task. Recently, he had an experience that drove this point home more effectively than any of my rantings.
He called an airline and asked to be switched to an earlier flight on his scheduled day of departure. He learned his flight was overbooked, but the representative told him he still would need to pay a change fee to book the earlier flight. Applying logic here, shouldn't the airline gladly remove someone from an overbooked flight and balance their passenger lists?
Don't apply logic to air travel costs.
Sure enough, when he arrived at the airport, gate attendants were making multiple pleas over the loudspeaker for passengers to accept a voluntary bump, for which each would receive a $300 voucher plus the cost of their ticket.
So, to sum up, my colleague offered to make the switch for free a day earlier and was told he'd have to pay a fee to do so. A day later, the airline is paying people hundreds of dollars to make that same switch, and disrupting multiple travel schedules in the process.
Overbooking is a fact of life. Airlines don't want empty seats. Apparently collecting change fees at any cost is a fact of life as well.
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