Originally Posted by
caverunner17
I just picked DEN-ORD on a random Tuesday in September (12th)
Frontier and Spirit are $64/OW, UA BE is $171
Even with a $25 checked bag, Spirit and Frontier are $89. UA is $186 with a carryon.
Why would I want to spend 2x as much on UA on a 2hr flight? They aren't even trying to be competitive here. Why would anyone take UA over AA or WN which is also $171 without the stupid limitations of BE?
UA is just shooting themselves in the foot.
or, at least for this particular routing, maybe hey know they don't need to be competitive by price with ULCCs because they know they can fill these flights with higher fare traffic.
Of all the markets they would want to compete directly with the ULCCs on in price, Id guess the hub-to-hub ones would probably be the least likely candidates. If UA needs to resort to matching Soirit prices to fill seats on a hub-hub route, particularly when one end has so little long-haul international flights that almost all that traffic would need to connect from somewhere, then I'd say UA is in pretty big trouble as a business.