Originally Posted by
belynch
They only pay attention (or care) when bookings/revenue suffer. I never wrote a letter/complained about BE, I just booked away. My thesis is enough others passively digested the change, realized it wasn't in their best interest to book on UA (or corporate rules made it harder to do it) and off they went to other carriers.
Hence my point yesterday about hoping Kirby gets knocked down a peg with this move. Customers can, and do, push back.
Well BE was the big "1 billion in extra revenue" idea that United was pushing.
While many people on this thread bought in, I assumed it would take a few quarters for it to shake out as UA lost more valuable traffic. It appears though that we are beginning to see the results of BE + a series of CS failures (doa, etc) further damaging UA's reputation + "enhanced" (aka lowered) economy hard product such as 3-4-3 on the 77W, in worse numbers.
Delta is now projecting "2Q passenger unit revenue increased ~2.5%, as Delta’s commercial initiatives and an improving revenue environment offset 0.5 points of unit revenue pressure from the April storm disruption."
United has not posted an update since June's Traffic report, when they said "The company continues to expect second-quarter 2017 consolidated passenger unit revenue to be up 1.0 to 3.0 percent compared to the second quarter of 2016. However, the Pacific region is experiencing incremental weakness due to unfavorable supply and demand dynamics in China and Hong Kong."
It will be interesting if UA adjusts this (and we should know in the next few days), but the guidance (Delta's is up, UA is still suggesting the midpoint) is suggesting Delta will yet again beat United in revenue growth, which will IMHO suggest that BE has not helped, and may have hurt United's bottom line. Such a result would be very very noteworthy, as I (and I assume others) would have expected a quarterly bump due to the BE fare hike under the "you can always fool someone once" principle that UA's management seems to count on.