Originally Posted by
Kacee
WN has been very savvy about competing with UA lately, I suspect taking deliberate advantage of the dissatisfaction the BE fares have created. They've been dropping their "Anytime" fares to undercut the flexible UA fares pretty substantially ($33 less OW on SFO-SAN). And UA has totally failed to react.
Meantime, I've been CPU'ing all my flights at T-96. Earlier this year, I was consistently missing at 50% of the time on E and U fares.
Interesting that your (since you fly UA more than I do) CPU experience has been the same as what I have seen.
I would expect a pattern where when BE was first rolled out, some booked it w/o knowing, but little book away. But I would expect the book-away to build, and elites start to look around over a period of time as they got tired of paying up with each flight. What you (and I) are seeing in smaller F lists is what I would expect to see as people got tire of paying more to avoid BE, some just give in and go BE on short flights, some fly OALs.
I don't know WN's pricing well, but IMHE they have not always matched UA. I know that DL/AS/VX are shadowing UA's BE pricing with regular Y (other than for DL in the very lowest fare bucket) in SFO-SEA.
Originally Posted by
findark
Interesting play on the part of WN. I definitely agree that if UA's implementation of BE has been hamstrung by anything, it's their complete inability to be agile in an individual market and adjust fares accordingly. They absolutely rolled out the product too far and too fast and clearly don't have the staff available to manage it.
I've also seen WN loudly bashing BE in their banner ads for intra-CA fares too - can't find the actual advertisement but something along the lines of "the only basic thing here is that everything is included" (typical WN pitch).
I think the part I bolded though applies to to nearly everything United does. The UA attitude post-merger has ben "we are so big you have to fly us" and there appears to be a strong dose of that in UA's BE moves. United is unable to look at the competitive dynamic market by market and adjust rather than having one analyst-driven size fits all. [Another example, VX/AS/DL all give a meal on SFO-SEA in F, UA gives a snack basket.]
You can't sit out there with non-competitive fares and not have it impact you over time, particularly when you rub your non-competitiveness in people's faces. A good example was my UA seat-mate SEA-SFO the other day. They worked for the largest exporter in the US (hint, hint) and their travel portal had "approved" and exception flights. My seatmate wanted to fly UA (they like to have miles/status in *A as they like the *A network best of any) but said that recent flights have all shown AS/VX/DL as approved, and UA as all being exception flights as they were $15+ more. The result was this was their only recent UA flight, as they did not want to have to do a written justification or pay the fare difference themselves.
