Originally Posted by
Changeup2000
Unlikely, unless the ULCCs will also offer flex fares. However, this is against their business model. They want to sell you inflexible fares such that they got a good projection of their cash flow, not needing to hold reserve cash for all the potential refund requests.
Except that "Flex" fares are a bit of a misnomer. if you look at the OP's first post you will note the red "x" under the Flex column for the "Refundable?" question. To stereotype slightly, Flex is basically what people using other people's money buy to earn 100% status miles and hope for an e-upgrade.
Originally Posted by
c224488
Flown YVR to YYZ about 8 times this year. If the Basic fare was $130, I would assume/expect the flex fare to be $240-260 based on my experience.
I agree with you that the Flex fares are higher than normal.
AC's pricing seems to gyrate depending on how the pricing gods feel - pre-Covid, they would basically assign a floor price to Flex but drop the lower fares to whatever suited the competitive nature of the market. For the last few years they have tried to keep a certain gap between Basic, Standard, Flex and Comfort, so that as the low fares groups went down, so did the higher ones, which is also how it worked long ago. It looks like at least on this route at this time they are trying to bring back "pricing discipline" (i.e. relatively high prices) for people who want frequent flyer perqs. Hopefully Mr. Market says a firm "No!" to this trial balloon.