Integrating Overbooking with Capacity Planning: Static Model and Application to Airlines

Abstract

Many firms that practice overbooking are able to adjust capacity prior to the service time. This study proposes an integrated approach for a firm's overbooking and capacity planning. We formulate a static model that simultaneously optimizes the firm's capacity level and overbooking limit. We find that the optimal level of capacity with overbooking can be higher and lower than that without overbooking. This is because overbooking has both positive and negative effects on the marginal value of capacity. It suggests that the level of capacity can be set too low or too high if overbooking is not taken into account when making capacity planning decisions. Moreover, our analysis shows that overbooking leads to a lower optimal capacity level if and only if the marginal cost of capacity is below a threshold. It is also shown that a higher cost per denied service or a higher service level does not necessarily lead to a higher optimal capacity level. We then extend the static model to explicitly account for an airline's demand‐driven dispatch (i.e., reassignments of aircraft types to flight legs). Numerical experiments show that the integrated approach can significantly improve an airline's expected profit, compared to the sequential approach that optimizes capacity planning (aircraft type assignments) and overbooking decisions in two separate and consecutive steps. The benefit of the integrated approach remains significant when a service level constraint is imposed.