And that's the angle I'm coming from. I'm not a plat member. I do think an E+ product allows for elites to be a little more comfortable (ie. remain loyal because of an almost guaranteed benefit) with the opportunity to buy up with some skin in the game with either reduced miles or co-pay option whilst keeping the top tier elites happy as a lark.

Bottom line, I hope the rumor is true.

But it doesn't have to go out empty. If there are co-pay or mileage upgrades specifically for the lower tier elites. Heck, they are doing it now!

My mother, non-elite, snagged first class upgrade from FLL to IAH($59) and from EWR to IAH ($79) while there was an upgrade waitlist.

It's already happening.

Or across markets.

CO can maintain whatever they want, but if you're #15 on the upgrade list because you're not flying OKC-IAH to snag that elusive upgrade, it doesn't matter what the overall rate is across the system.

Do you have proof of these offers? What fare class was your mother booked in?

i did 24 hour check in
 

I did 24 hour check in for her on both.

Proof is I paid for it with my credit card at the time!

Didn't CO already acknowledge this was happening in error in some circumstances. The band-aid on the situation was heavier EUA processing at T-24, though it's not clear it's not impacting connectors.

What fare class was it? If she was on a moderate fare, those amounts could be segment buy-ups - the difference between her paid fare and the lowest applicable F fare. These are offered regardless of who is on the list.

If she was on a discount fare, such as S, T or L, then she received a segment-fee upgrade offer - those are not supposed to be offered unless the number of F seats > the number of upgrade-eligible Elites. Sometimes people can still be on the list when the offer is made, but CO knows they will clear for sure.

If it was apparent people would not clear, and she received a segment-fee upgrade, then that is something we need to capture with screen shots.

^ If true from another UA kool aid drinker. At 6'3" I need the extra room. I will not fly CO in Y now. I did it once SFO-IAH-MGA and have never been so uncomfortable. Now I am buying Z fares which is good for CO but bad on my wallet and not always possible. If I can't get a Z fare on CO I fly Taca instead on this route and forego EQM's, and TA bites. I shudder at the thought of taking a CO trans con in Y but would if there was E+, but until then I'll stick to UA. One can only hope.

If this is true, I dont think I will fly UA much anymore. CO has a much newer aircraft, better inflight service, and better flight times.

Newer aircraft, yes, but all 737's domestically. Better inflight service, I really don't think so, at least the 15 flights or so I have on since last Oct. Better flight times, perhaps for you based in SEA.

Still, CO is better than my other options.

United E+ for CO elites...
 

On a related topic...

Is there any rumor as to when E+ on united will be available to CO elites?

I plan to buy several tickets for April and May, and am considering to fly UA heavily.

The statement says "Summer," and considering they beat their Q2 target for UDU, I would think that bodes well for sooner rather than later. But it may not be ready for April/May travel.


This is exactly why CO needs to do something. In addition to a consolation prize for poor upgrade delivery, CO is risking losing business with this arrangement once its Elites figure out UA offers them more legroom gratis.

While we're speculating, here's my view of how this might work.

Each row of coach is 31" of pitch. Take out a row and you have 31" to "play with". That would allow the airline to, for example, add 5" of pitch to 6 rows for an E+ section with 36" of pitch (similar to most of UA I think?). Or 7 rows with 4 extra inches (35"). I think that's enough, no?

So to consider the 6 lost seats. They only matter if the plane would have otherwise gone out nearly full. For simplicity let's say 10% of flights go out full (of paid passengers). Those last 6 seats are probably sold at Y/B/M fares, so let's say $400 o/w. But without the ability to sell those last 6 seats, they'll probably be able to bump up the pricing on the prior 6 seats, so for argument's sake I'll assume they only forego $300 in revenue per seat, or $1800 for the flight. Across the system, that's $180 per flight on average (10% of $1800). So they only need an additional $180 in revenue per flight to come out even. That would be the sale of 6 E+ seats per flight for $30. JetBlue, which doesn't give away the EML seats free (to my knowledge) to anyone, certainly sells more than 6 of these seats per flight at IIRC $15-40 each. Not sure about United. Obviously they're not getting any direct revenue from the elites, and I recognize there needs to be enough E+ seats left for sale to non-elites for this math to work. Take out two rows of coach and obviously it gets more difficult to replace the lost ticket revenue.

But in the end, I think it's doable. I'm sure some of you will poke holes in the analysis, I admit it's very rough and simplistic, but illustrative of how they're probably thinking about it and how they might be able to make this work. And it doesn't factor the penalty if they don't add MRTC, namely CO elites flying a little bit more on UA.

Lastly, I've said it before, and someone alluded to it here, that AA's More Room Throughout Coach failed, in contrast to E+, because MRTC had no mechanism to directly monetize the extra legroom. Clearly E+ allows it, and the key is figuring out if you can earn enough to offset potential lost sales from the removal of seats. (Of course in an environment where airlines are cutting capacity, it's hard to argue that removing seats is bad.)

I've done a similar such rough analysis. But the difference I use is that the seats they're removing are out of the L bucket (presumably they'd sell fewer cheap fares if they had fewer cheap seats to sell) and they don't necessarily sell all of them when they run into a nearly full flight.

So 10% of the time they sell any of those seats. Of that 10% of the time that they sell any of those seats, for the sake of argument, say they fill an average of three (3) of them. Sometimes they'd fill all 6, sometimes just 1. Hence the 3.

If you diminish the L bucket (and that's what revenue management would do given lower capacity), say that's $100 on average per flight, domestic (could be less when you figure you can do $100 on a 2-segment direction, so $100 could be generous).

So 3 x $100 = $300 lost on 10% of the flights. 90% of the flights lose nothing. Using these numbers, the average revenue loss is $30 per flight, which can be made up easily with upsells and gained loyalty.

Other cost savings can come from having 150 seats (1 less FA) and the less fuel needed since the number of passengers is lower.

Of course, there needs to be justification for the capex up front...