Delta Offers to Buy Seats Back on Overbooked Flight for $10K

The airline isn't talking, but passengers on a plane about to take off Monday in Michigan said the Delta crew offered them $10,000 each to give up their seat. The plane was still at the gate in Grand Rapids when a flight attendant announced over the intercom that the airline needed eight volunteers to agree to be bumped, calling the flight "apparently oversold," USA Today reports. Jason Aten, a tech columnist for Inc. magazine, wrote that the crew member said, "If you have Apple Pay, you'll even have the money right now."

The offer started at $5,000, another passenger said, per KTVB. When it rose to $10,000, "I looked at my wife and I thought, 'No way,'" said Todd McCrumb. The two were unable to take the offer. At least four people did take the crew up on the deal, passengers said. "We did not take it for reasons I'm not going to get into because my wife is still not pleased about it," Aten wrote. The flight took off about 20 minutes behind schedule, bound for Minneapolis, per Cirium’s flight tracker. Delta increased the maximum payment to passengers on an oversold flight from $1,350 to $9,950 in 2017, per CNBC. (More overbooking stories.)