No doubt most people would you leave a flight for $10,000.
Delta Airlines reportedly offered passengers to get off an oversold flight from Michigan to Minnesota.
Jason Aten, a tech columnist at Inc. magazine was on the flight and wrote about:
“…On a recent Delta Air Lines flight, my family and I were traveling to Minneapolis to catch a flight to Alaska. As we sat on the plane waiting to leave the gate, the announcement overhead explained that the flight was apparently oversold and they were looking for eight volunteers.
In exchange for their seats, Delta was offering $10,000 cash.
"If you have Apple Pay, you'll even have the money right now," the flight attendant said.
Ten. Thousand. Dollars.
On the one hand, you can certainly make the case that $10,000 is a lot of money to give people for the inconvenience of taking a later flight. I think, for the most part, that's correct. It is a lot of money, and if the later flight still gets you wherever you were headed in a reasonable amount of time, it seems like you'd be silly not to take it. (Spoiler alert: We did not take it for reasons I'm not going to get into because my wife is still not pleased about it.)
Look, I get that there are a lot of variables that go into deciding how much money to offer in a situation like this. I would argue that $10,000 seems like a lot, and in all of the flying I do, I've never seen it before.
Several people I spoke to who also travel a lot had never heard of it before.”