Originally Posted by
nomad420
They sure seem to "tease" a whole lot of people. I see that often over half the pax on any given flight are in the E- section. I would think they would rather sell a cheap seat than run it empty. Call me crazy.
Not everyone in E- purchased a BE ticket. They're two separate things and really shouldn't be conflated.
Originally Posted by
LarryJ
The author seems unaware of the operational reasons for the BE restrictions.
I have the utmost respect for the insight you provide to the board,
LarryJ, but in this case, I'm afraid I just can't buy it. The operational reasons were/are simply justifications to get the results they wanted, not actual criteria that went into making a decision. If they were that important, management could have addressed the root cause -- bag fees (particularly the first bag fee).
Originally Posted by
LarryJ
BE leaves more seats unassigned until departure time easing the process of seating families together or accommodating passengers with special needs which reduces the workload on the gate agent and contributes to on-time departures.
I mean, maybe? But the practice of marking nearly every window or aisle seat as "preferred" flies in the face of that.
Originally Posted by
LarryJ
Meanwhile, all new narrowbody aircraft are being delivered with larger bins, that take bags wheels-in and on their shortest side, so that everyone's bag will fit,
Even with the new bins, they won't be able to fit one rollaboard per passenger, and that's before you even get to the people who think it's perfectly OK to put everything they own in the overhead. Also, are the A319/A320 getting larger bins?
Originally Posted by
fwfdan
I have compared BE and E in prior purchases for short flights. It was cheaper to buy BE, pay for a seat (which I think some other airlines do not allow) and then plan to board last and gate check my bag. It works for me.
Unless you have status with UA, you cannot gate check your bag as a UA BE passenger (well, you pay like $70 or something).
Originally Posted by
trooper
Ive asked for clarification before when people made this type of comment....without result. "Full service" airfares used to be lower? OK..but so were petrol/energy prices, real estate values, food prices, AND even of course a lot of salaries/wages... Do YOU work in some sort of commercial field? Have the prices of whatever product YOU offer/produce remained static? Can YOUR product still be obtained in ANY form (even trimmed down) for the "old" price... as BE fares can be?
Sorry, just – no. There is no question that BE was the most successful price increase in airline history. It's not revisionist history, because I watched, very carefully, when BE was rolled out. For all of their claptrap about ULCCs, what UA
actually did was introduce a BE price at the exact same fare that regular economy had been the day before, and then they introduced a new regular economy fare at a high price point. What they did not do — even as a deflection! — was keep the regular fares the same and then introduce new lower BE fares.
There may have been some very small number of markets where UA was losing money trying to compete with the ULCCs -- and you will occasionally see things like $99 Basic Economy and $599 regular economy for a last-minute purchase. So, you might be able to pick out a small subset of fares where you could argue that BE is a price decrease,
maybe. But look at UA's operating income and it's clear that they're making a
lot of money and not selling a lot of BE seats. That's because, at the risk of being repetitious, BE was a product designed
not to be sold. The
fewer BE seats UA sells, the more successful BE is.