The Cost of a Denied Boarding is More Than You Think

By Mahir Sahin, Head Timatic & Passenger Experience Solutions at IATA

A passenger arrives at your check-in counter. Their passport is expired, or they are missing their visa for their transit or destination point, or Timatic says they needed an authorization before travel. Whatever the reason is, they cannot travel. Check-in agents turn them away, the flight is on time, some information is logged and then it loses its visibility completely.

That denied boarding costs more than you think. We’ve done some analysis and a projection that a single denied boarding likely costs an airline between $2,300 and $16,000 depending on how well it was handled. This is not fines, there is no repatriation. They are quite visible in your books but the commercial loss underneath, the staff time, the potential delay, the potential legal exposure, the passenger you may have lost, and the people they tell are quite hidden but impactful.

We calculated these figures from the ground up. We have checked the approximate time a denied boarding case consumes and treated it as the opportunity cost of diverting staff rather than another person employed. We did factor in delays but only where it’s a rare gate-side case that causes a bag-offload resulting in a delay while most denials happen at check-in and never touch boarding. We weighed the legal exposure against the fact that passengers typically won’t take legal action considering that it’s clearly their responsibility. Then we modelled the loss of future business with the customer, seat spoilage, and by applying probabilities to each case and their likelihood. This range is a projection, and not a measured figure. But our analysis is built on real inputs and the spread between the two numbers tells an important story.

The biggest differentiator for the spread, roughly $14,000, is all about how you prepared for and have handled the situation. The denied boarding that is caught early and handled well sits at the bottom of this range. This is not a compliance cost. It’s the cost of a poor process and it is within your control.

There are two elements that make the biggest difference. 

The first one is at what point of the journey the passenger is denied. A problem caught at check-in may not cause a flight delay but the one at the gate can mean a bag offload, a missed slot, and a distressed passenger in a public space. The same denial costs a fraction at home when using online check-in.

The second is how the passenger is treated. This is something that most customer experience leaders will recognize and appreciate. It’s the same dynamic that governs every service failure. When a customer believes a problem was their own fault, they are far less likely to switch to a competitor or complain publicly than when they believe you were at fault or you didn’t treat them well. While travel document compliance is unusual in that among any service failure the faults with this generally lie with the passenger. This works in favor of the airlines, but only if the matter was handled in a way that lets the passenger agree with that understanding. A clear, private, respectful denial with some pragmatic help in resolving the issue for the passenger protects the relationship over a cold, public, and dismissive one.

Denied boarding is the failure point but not where you apply the solution

By the time a passenger reaches your check-in counter, you have already lost. The denial is not where you solve this problem. It’s the point where you discover that you have failed to solve it.

A passenger cannot realistically get a missing visa 3 hours before departure. An expired passport cannot be renewed at the airport quickly. So, everything you do at the airport from that moment on is damage control.

The actual work that prevents denied boarding happens days, weeks, if not months earlier while the passenger still has time to act.

How to actually prevent denied boarding

The solution here does not consist of a single intervention. It’s through the creation of a sequence, a culture, a behavior with relevant support mechanisms available.

1. Start at booking – The moment a passenger confirms their trip; they are more engaged and less stressed than they will be when they are travelling. This is the highest leverage moment. Tell the passenger exactly what they need, tailored to the passenger and not a generic “please check your documents”. Specificity is everything here. “You need to apply for an e-visa for Vietnam. This usually takes a few days to be processed” drives action. “Ensure you have valid documents” gets ignored because every passenger thinks their passport is valid as long as it’s not expired.
2. Remind the right passenger, not all passengers – Check which passengers actually have some requirements to meet, by the route and their nationality. Inform the ones who have actions and leave the rest of them alone. Blanket reminders create the behavior to ignore your messages. Targeted ones create credibility.
3. Escalate as the window closes – About a week before departure is the last realistic point to obtain any eVisa or ETA or maybe get a validity extension of your passport. If the passenger still has not confirmed compliance switch to more direct channels than e-mail like SMS or a push notification.
4. Increase your off-airport check-in rates – Web and mobile check-in are the last digital moments you can control before the denied boarding is happening at the airport. Make sure you do your final checks before enabling the passenger to go to the airport. It’s crucial to surface the issue clearly here and offer any assistance to help resolve or remedy it.

All of these steps share a common objective; put the right information in front of the right passenger at the right moment where they can still make a change. If you do that consistently, the denied boardings as well as the cost associated with each will go down and turn into an rare exception.

Where to start

There is no need to rebuild your entire passenger communication strategy, to begin. You can start by giving your passengers a way to check their own requirements. This is exactly what Timatic Widget does. It goes directly on your website or your booking flow drawing from the same IATA verified passport, visa, and health requirements that all airlines have trusted for decades.

If you would like to learn more about the details of our study and the model we applied, or do a joint study to measure the impact, or learn more about Timatic Widget please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

The cheapest denied boarding is the one that never happens.