Originally Posted by
HNLbasedFlyer
UA in mid-January has 14 non-stops SFO-LAX vs. 9 for SWA, so I don't see that as ceding the market, at least for Jan 16. UA does indeed match the $49 "wanna get away" fare, at least for Jan 16-23 roundtrip with BE - except for the UA Express flights ($98 SWA vs. $97 UA). But its not 50% more to fly regular economy, the regular economy fare is $125 roundtrip (at the time I wrote this - and I'd pay that to avoid SWA). But I'll go back to what I said before, I don't think UA is terribly interested in selling the $97 roundtrip tickets - they will sell it as a price match, but that isn't the target audience they want to attract, in my opinion.
Interesting... the SFO/LAX fare table looks pretty messy at the moment, but there is a $10 differential fare
GAA3TCDN/
GAA3TCBN and BE is only published up to G. For the moment, it looks quite a bit more friendly -- my comments are based on historical experience from the last several months and IME, UA seesaws back and forth on this with so little predictability I kind of doubt there is directed effort behind it.
With regard to the market, UA has more frequency on SFO/LAX specifically (allegedly a hub-to-hub route after all) but is badly lacking in QSF/QLA as they fly mostly CR2s on SFO-BUR/ONT and don't even service SJC-LAX! I don't think they really care about selling SFO-LAX O&D tickets; WN has eaten their lunch with that. The frequency is for routing flow over the segment, for any combination of (XXX-)SFO-LAX(-YYY) etc. I'm sure they sell O&D tickets aplenty, but I don't think it's their focus.