Originally Posted by
EmailKid
The the idea of BE came along, and the price they felt they needed to charge for no frills customer remained the same, but the price that offered more than what ULCCs were offering, i.e. Spirit's et al Bare Fare was raised to what UA felt it should have been all along.
UA may have been selling that narrative when they introduced BE, but it doesn't match reality, and it never did. They do not compete with ULCCs on every domestic city pair, but every domestic city pair now has BE, and you can safely expect it to be rolled out worldwide once they figure out the logistics.
If all they wanted to do was match Spirit's Base Fare, they didn't need differential pricing on BE. All they needed to accomplish that was for N to be a normal fare bucket below G. They could allocate a certain amount of space to N and be done with it, and people could continue to purchase it or buy the next available class instead.
And if all they wanted to do was compete with ULCCs, they would have rolled it out selectively on routes with head-to-head competition, as DL did when they originally invented the concept.
BE is nothing but a fare increase, with conditions that disproportionately affect Premier members (no CPUs, no E+ access, no SDC).