Basic Economy to Main Cabin Price Difference Increase?
 

Anybody else notice that it seems the difference in fare price between Basic Economy and Main Cabin has gone up in the past few days?

Was asked for $35 each direction to upgrade to main cabin fare from DEN-MIA (via MSP), and $25 each direction for DEN-CSG (via ATL), never have been asked for more than $15/way before on a standard route connection under 4 hours from DEN-AAA-BBB...

Seems to me DL is following UA in increasing these fare differences to me, as UA went from $15 on most of my DEN routes to $40... :td: from me

Hopefully just unlucky on my part, but I'm not too hopeful

I think DL's RM is matching UA. Typical for airlines to price match on competition out of hubs.

I hate this, particularly because Google Flights doesn't seem to have an option for me to exclude E fares. I don't actually care what the difference is, I just want an easy way to compare apples to apples. I'd rather fly WN any day than take a basic economy flight on a legacy.

Ironically, you can't search WN on Google Flights either. However, I think the upcharge from E on the same route is still the same. So if you accidentally found E. Go see what the upcharge is and just add that to the fare whenever you see the same price. If you see a higher price, it is unlikely E.

It's easy enough to exclude Basic Economy fares from a delta.com search. It's easy enough to exclude them from ITA Matrix searches limited to Delta-coded flights, too. Use this string in the advanced controls/routing codes field:

dl+ / f ~bc=e

Matrix is how I handle it as well, once I've used Google Flights for a destination. Still an irritation. I admit I almost never do my flight searches on delta.com until I pretty much already know what I'm booking.

Now that all three legacies offer a Basic fare of some kind, there is competetive pricing, not only against LCC's, but other carriers.

Bear in mind that the goal isn't to sell BE as a primary fare, but to use it to sell seats which most travelers won't purchase. The more people willing to sit in the middle seat just ahead of the aft lav, the more this will be offered.

I think it is an outrage that UA Million Milers cannot get a decent seat in basic economy. We were the lucky ones back when all this started in 1984. Now, it is hard to believe what they have taken away from frequent flyers. Big deal, we can bring a bag for free. I thought we would always have Mileage Plus. It was painful enough when they took away the international upgrades. My husband and I will be flying a couple of short flight in economy minus this fall. We will see....

I love Google Flights, but some feature I most desperately want from them are:
A) Allow exclusion of BE fares on legacy carriers
B) Allow exclusion of ULCC carriers as a group (Allegiant, Spirit, etc)
C) Remember my default settings for these (and other) options each time I load the site so I don't have to reselect the filters.

I'm never going to buy a BE fare. I'm highly unlikely to fly Spirit, Allegiant, etc. I'm tired of having to exclude Category B manually every time I search, and not being able to exclude Category A is a nuisance.

Well, there's a simple way to avoid the Basic Economy restrictions...

Just as an FYI, you posted this in the DL thread-- the UA forum has its own thread for discussing Basic Economy on UA: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...cussion-q.html

^ Agreed on all three, roughly in that order of priority.