Our story
Why an overbooked flight and a travel voucher led me to build Bumped.
It started with my own flight
In October 2026, I was travelling from Cairo to Hong Kong via Abu Dhabi on a single Etihad Airways booking.
At Abu Dhabi airport, I was told that my connecting flight to Hong Kong was overbooked and that I couldn't board. I had a confirmed ticket, showed up for my flight, and had done nothing wrong. Yet I was the one left behind.
I spent nearly two hours at the airport trying to resolve the situation with Etihad staff. Eventually, I was rebooked onto another flight a few hours later and offered just USD 200 in Etihad travel credit, valid for 12 months.
After returning home, I exchanged several rounds of emails with Etihad, requesting cash compensation and asking for the specific policy or legal basis behind their decision.
They never provided the specific justification I asked for. Instead, they maintained their position and eventually closed my complaint unilaterally, without resolving my concerns.
What frustrated me most wasn't just the amount of compensation. It was the imbalance of responsibility.
The airline made a commercial decision to oversell its flight. I spent hours at the airport dealing with a problem I didn't cause, had my travel plans disrupted, and then had to spend even more time chasing an explanation.
Why should passengers bear the consequences of an airline's commercial decisions?
That's why I built Bumped.
Read my original post on XOne passenger should not disappear into a timeline
I built Bumped to bring public accounts like mine together. I want people to be able to read what passengers say, follow the original sources, and see these experiences together.
A passenger denied boarding or involuntarily downgraded because of overbooking can be easy to dismiss in isolation. Bumped makes those existing public accounts visible together. Our position is simple: passengers should not pay the price for airline overbooking.
My experience, and a public record
This is my account of what happened to me. Other posts belong to their authors. Bringing them together does not prove an abnormal overbooking rate, and supporting the site never buys influence over the wall.
Bumped is an independent consumer-advocacy project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Etihad Airways or X. We do not provide legal advice, handle compensation claims, assert a statistically abnormal overbooking rate, or treat unverified third-party statements as established fact.
The original author stays in control
Anyone can submit the URL of a public X post. Automated screening publishes only clearly eligible, low-risk submissions; uncertain, sensitive, unavailable, or failed lookups go to human review. Every published card can also be reported for review.
Posts remain attributed to their authors and link to X. We do not edit, translate, summarize, screenshot, or permanently archive third-party posts. Successful source data is cached for 24 hours, so edits, deletion, or restrictions may take up to 24 hours after a successful fetch to appear, plus provider delay.
What we store
D1 stores only post URLs or IDs and moderation metadata. A separate 24-hour KV cache holds successful public post data and media URLs, never media files. Cards, admin preview, and screening share the configured source. Site moderation takes effect on subsequent requests even while cache entries remain.
Bumped is free for visitors and submitters. Optional contributions help cover domain, API, and hosting costs. Supporting never changes screening, moderation, order, or visibility and unlocks no badge or privilege.
Contact
For questions, corrections, or removal concerns, contact us on X or by email: @victorymakes · victorylaunches@gmail.com