Originally Posted by
jsloan
I suspect they'd keep the B fares around for the same thing they're currently used for -- last-minute purchases on nearly sold-out planes, and a baseline off of which they can afford to offer a steep corporate discount.
Y and B almost always mirror each other, so I suspect that if they were to eliminate most B fares they'd just use Y for that. Delta still publishes W, but I don't think that they're really ever used except for perhaps some weird edge cases. (I don't know if it is possible, absent an IT glitch, for a DL flight to be W1 Y0 to break fare differential pricing.)
Originally Posted by
symphonicman
Someone who's more knowledgeable than me—do the first letters of those fare basis codes mean that inventory will also be required in L/T/S respectively (in this case)?
Technically the dual inventory requirements are on another screen, but the first letter of the fare basis being different from the booking code usually means, absent a mistake, there are dual inventory requirements and that the inventory represented by the first letter of the fare basis would need to be available in addition to B. It's how the fare differential pricing that jsloan mentioned works.