jsloan

No, it has nothing to do with Spirit. As Seth just said, they're not targeting any markets; this is a phased rollout, and the phases are coming quickly.

UA is raising their economy fares in most markets and rolling out BE to obfuscate that. Their intention is to have UA flights look the same in OTA search results, but then to collect incremental revenue when passengers balk at the restrictions or when they have to check a bag.

If this had anything to do with matching low fares, they would simply have introduced a low-fare BE bucket with the usual pricing and availability rules. The way that they introduced it -- adding a differential fare from every existing fare in the market, all the way up to Y, originally -- wasn't necessary to compete with cheap fares.

On ORD-LGA, a search for 5/18 shows published BE fares from $52 (G-BN) to $380 (E-BN). They could make an argument about the $52 fare being a ULCC response, but not the $380 one.

Interestingly, whereas when this was first introduced, the BE fares went all the way up to Y; for example, that same 5/18 date for MSP-DEN, using a ticketing date of 3/16, shows BAA0AFBN (a $5 discount to BAA0AFEY) and YAA0AFBN (A $35 discount to YUA; YAA0AFEY doesn't seem to exist). If I change the ticketing date back to today, the highest BE fare is MAA7AKBN, a $15 discount to MAA7AKEN. In fact, none of the refundable fares in that market currently have a BE equivalent. I wonder if this is a response to some negative feedback? (It definitely contradicts their original statement that BE fares wouldn't be capacity-controlled, but I doubt anyone's going to shed tears over this).