jsloan

Basic Economy is live; you can see it on MSP-LAX. The fare table is currently broken, however; on an example roundtrip from 8/1-8/15, the Basic Economy fare is currently more expensive than the regular economy fare.

Selecting Basic Economy results in a pop-up window requesting confirmation. There's a checkbox, off by default, saying that you agree to the conditions. You have to select the checkbox before you can purchase the fare.

The first batch of BE fares are limited to non-stop flights.

Also: UA does appear to have published BE matching fares all the way up to Y, although the BE-Y fare currently requires B class availability, so I think it's broken also.

Looking at the fares in EF for that particular date, and matching them by prefix, they appear to be using a fixed $50 price differential on a roundtrip; e.g., KAA4AKBN is $198 and KAA4AKEN is $248; EAA7AFBN is $1020 and EAA7AFEN is $1070. Note to EF users: these fares are showing up in EF the same way that DL's do -- the booking class listed is the underlying class, not N. To see if it's a BE fare or not, you'd need to look at the last two letters of the fare (-BN) or pull up the fare class mapping screen (the 'C' icon on the far right-hand side of the EF fare display).