I mean - I do think there is a legitimate market for this when it is priced below main cabin for non-statused customers. Especially those who might be a bit taller. I know I will break Flyertalk's brain here but all else being equal (full plane) I prefer a middle seat with 34" of pitch than a window seat (especially in a 737). 30-31" aisle vs. 34" C+ can be a bit of a tougher call since you can angle your legs out into the aisle a bit.

I don't drink much on planes, but C+ comes with free drinks. You still get early boarding so your carry-on will probably not get gate checked. You still get MQDs. You still get some revenue miles. You still get lounge access if you have a card. If you know your travel plans won't change, losing free changes isn't a big deal.

Now, as soon as Basic Comfort costs more than Main Cabin then it becomes a tougher sell. But at the price point positioned so far, I do see people buying it.




Not sure the data would prove that out. Basic Economy tickets are likely, on average, booked out further in advance than a main cabin ticket. For PM and DMs you'll likely find a bimodal distribution (leisure travel booked relatively far in advance, most business travel booked close in). Still, classic revenue management practice assumes that unrestricted tickets are sold closer in than restricted tickets, although I cannot find any industry literature that supports that in the modern Basic Economy world.

I do think this will be a point of annoyance for PM/DMs. You'll have to verify that C+ is actually available for sale rather than checking the seat map (technically you've always had to do this since a booking doesn't have to have a seat reservation, but it is so exceptionally rare that usually an open seat on the seat map = an upgrade).

Comfort Basic books into the same booking classes as Comfort Classic (W and S) and does not have separate booking class like Main Basic (E). So they can't directly limit Comfort Basic seats available for purchase vs. Comfort Classic. However, looking at the fare filings on EF on DCA-MIA, the Comfort Basic fares all have advance purchase requirements of 14, 21, or 30 days. This means you can no longer purchase Comfort Basic fares on flights once you are less than 14 days out from them.

Note that since there are two bands of Comfort class fares corresponding to W and S inventory, the Comfort Basic fares are only cheaper than Main Classic when S inventory is open on flights. If there is only W bucket open, you will be bumped into the pricier band of Comfort fares and Comfort Basic looks to be slightly pricier than the corresponding Main Classic fares in this case. While the S class Comfort Basic fares look to typically be $5 less each-way than Main Classic, the W class ones look to be $5 more than corresponding Main Classic fare (as shown below with V basis one-way Main and Comfort fares). Fares with a '1' in 7th position of fare basis code are S class Comfort Basic and those with a '2' are W class Comfort Basic.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...5754d51b7b.png
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...6132798d42.png

One of the dumbest product ideas I’ve seen in a long time. They should have called it “Basic Discomfort.”

No one would intentionally choose this product if they understood the value proposition. This is intended to extract dollars from infrequent ma & pa kettles looking for something special for their hard-earned vacation.

Kind of insulting, honestly.

Yeah I wonder if part of the consultants’ thinking is to create confusion with this.

The value proposition here is indeed quite odd. In particular I would have thought the person paying extra for a better seat would be quite interested in being able to pick that seat!

Anecdotally C+ already seems to have been selling quite well and the erosion of the PM benefit is well underway. On a number of flights this year booked reasonably far in advance C+ has been completely sold out or middle seats only, while exit rows were still available. I wonder if the consultants are actually modeling the impact on willingness to participate in the status rat race.

I am not so opposed to unbundling (which seems to be a bit of a bogeyman around here) and there especially seems nothing wrong with being able to choose restricted/changeable/refundable in any cabin. What they are doing with these Experiences however is constructing new and weird bundles of attributes that nobody ever asked to have put together.

100%.

They’re also creating branding around stuff that always existed, which is having the unintended consequence of creating confusion. Specifically the “extra” tiers is just a refundable ticket, yet I’ve seen people posting both here and Reddit variations of “I don’t want extra, but I want refundable.”

I’d also contend that main basic and comfort basic are two different packages. Main is bare bones with every “indignity” thrown at the passenger. Comfort basic gives priority boarding, MQD, skymiles, and access to the SkyClub if you carry the reserve card/have a membership… for less than the price of coach (today). Sounds like a great deal if you’re an infrequent flyer who is willing to pay for main but doesn’t really care about sitting in the middle seat.

This is exactly the motivation, and I doubt anyone will convince me otherwise. DL is trying to move the Overton Window from WFBF to WCBC.

PSA.

Stop being loyal to any carrier. Free Agent allows one to pick the class of service and schedule they prefer. What is more important? The seat? or the bag tag?

As I mentioned above - with a price point below Main Cabin, there is a value proposition here that is real. It is obviously person-specific, but there is a value proposition. The fact that Delta calls out in the terms that you will likely get a middle seat I think is good - it aligns expectations. If they didn't say that, I'd be pushing back a bit more on this as an attempt to trick people.

Well, that's because the primary purpose is that it's just a consumer psychology trick. If you have three prices - say, $100, $150, and $375, the $375 makes the $150 "look better". No one is really meant to buy the "Extra" fares (that weren't already going to buy a refundable fare) - they are only there to make the middle tier (Main Cabin/Regular Comfort+/eventually Regular First) look like a better deal than it is.

It's a combination of anchoring effect, extremeness aversion effect, and extends the existing decoy/asymmetric dominance effect of Main Cabin vs. Basic Economy. Delta wants to have three top level options (for domestic flights at least) and then decompose those into three breakdown options that convince you to pick the middle price and not the cheapest price.

It's dumb, but it probably works. If it moves 5% of passengers that would have booked Basic Economy to buy Main Cabin, that's free revenue to Delta.

Yes, I agree, there is a value prop and a customer base that will buy this. It's not for everyone though.

Yep. Just like the most popular wine at a restaurant is the 'second cheapest'. People tend to see it as the best value.

I wish Delta actually published their Comfort+ sales ratio as you could see the same effect from just having a decent number of PM/DMs. I know this is the Atlanta effect, but even on more leisure routes/times, there's typically at least 12-15 PMs/Diamonds on a flight (assuming a 739 or A321... and obviously that can balloon to 50+ during business travel hours/routes, and add even more if it is a longer flight).

Of course not all of them are booking well in advance to your point. But there is no way to know if the seats are taken by DM/PMs or by Comfort+ fare passengers (other than maybe at time of boarding and seeing how many Diamonds pre-board, but even that is non-conclusive because a lot of folks wait to board).

All that said, I have noticed that Delta has shifted their pricing on C+ a bit lately. Some routes (especially 4 hour+ flights) had some pretty wild surcharges - sometimes as high as $300 r/t. I'm seeing more reasonable surcharges on long routes ($120-160) now. So perhaps you are right - they have decided to lower the pricing premium which is leading to more people actually booking it, which on certain configs (looking at you 739) means sold out aisle/windows pretty quickly.

The other way this makes sense, if I can't get an exit row window or aisle for enough pitch to be able to work, I'd consider the middle C+, just to have enough distance to get elbows to keyboard to work out. This is the compromise that those of us on 5+ hour flights might make where we can show a price lower than main, and book it where company rules say main only. This only worked once in the past getting First for less than main, and screenshot got it paid by the company.

I have definitely seen more reasonable prices lately, like a $15 one way upcharge for a sub-1 hour flight. To the point where I've thought, if I were Gold or Silver, I'd probably just pay to secure it at booking.

Bag tag for me. I am so insecure that I need validation from strangers whom I’ll never see again.

I can see that. Nothing like wasting money on people who are largely inconsequential to your life.

In the future, if anyone here wishes to waste money for validation, PM me and I will provide it at a discount.

Lol. Is it awful that as a lowly Silver, I sometimes take a strange pleasure in watching a person with a Diamond tag go rolling past me, as I sit in 1A, on their walk of shame back to Main?

Book what you want to fly. Then you can be like me and make status that is totally useless to you because your ticket in F already includes 95% of those amazing status perks already built-in. (Being a domestic-only FF is really rough for the status chase, by the way.)

You’re saying this as a silver…. I’m a DM earning it almost entirely on domestic man cabin tickets.

Ouch... that's a lot of seat time. Although in fairness, I'm a Gold on UA, and barely not a Gold on DL. I go about 60% UA / 40% DL. It is a bummer because I could easily be Plat if not 1K/Diamond on one of them if I could concentrate my spend on just one. The itins and/or fares just never consistently work out for me to do that, though. The status alone doesn't justify crummier itins or 50% higher price half the time when I'm in F 100% of the time anyway.

If this will be the general trend then will work out very well for me when traveling with family. I could just buy Comfort Basic for the kids since we in any case end up selecting 2 middle & aisle seats when we travel together.

Same. My first several years as DM, I earned it based on flight segments, not on miles. Brutal. I never want to do that again.

Except you don’t get to select which middle for the kids. Do you really want to play the seat swap game?

Yeah if/when the day comes that I am sitting in my C+ aisle seat and a family comes in with only middles and asks me to move so they can sit together, its going to be hard no.

Thats right up there with being asked to change my F aisle seat to row 1 window on a 739 - not going to happen.

Plus you can't mix and match fare types in a single booking so the kids would have to be split off on a separate PNR which creates its own issues (especially for minors).

I book one adult and 1 kid on each PNR. No issues checking in.

Yes, I suppose two bookings - one adult, one child in Comfort+ and one adult, one child in Comfort Basic could work, and then just put the kids in the middle after the (somewhat rude to other passengers) seat swap game. That doesn't avoid the greater risk of split automated rebookings during IRROPS though.

... and fondly remembers the good old days when change fees were higher than the ticket price.
At $400, the change fee for this fare class is higher than the 90th percentile of C+basic tickets sold.

We also have 2 aisle seats so getting someone to swap their aisle seats with ours seems doable. If not then they are old enough to sit by themselves in the same cabin as us.

Exactly. That's what I always do.

And of course the fare defaults to "comfort basic".
Set the trap and catch a few unsuspecting newbies to DL who have no idea what they just booked.
A "premium" likely middle seat with a $400 change fee.

Next DL will call avoiding C+ basic a new perk for PM and DM who never even look at the Comfort Fare let alone click on it.

Wish there was a setting to disable any Basic fare from showing when logged in. I've never bought basic in my life and I stil get tricked and nearly end up buying it regularly.

Obviously that's a "feature" according to Delta and working as intended for search algorithms. I do agree that I wish I could customize my search results to always exclude "Basic" and "Extra" fares, as you said, when logged in. I also have almost purchased Basic fares, but only when using the app.

I'm not sure why Delta would be against allowing us to customize our default search parameters when logged in. It wouldn't affect the broader search algorithms for crawlers, and people that never would book them don't have to deal with ever seeing them. Even if you accidentally purchased one of these fares you can immediately cancel for a full refund. The obvious answer, then, (IMO) is constrained Delta IT resources.

Changes fees are the same as Main Basic ($99 domestic/short-haul international and $199 for longer-haul international). At any rate, they pretty clearly don't want people to book these and upfare instead (hence the checkbox agreeing to terms).

I think the only reason these Comfort Plus "Basic" fares exist is so that Delta can roll out First Class "Basic" fares. There's no other reason, IMO. A company of Delta's size is not moving the needle in any appreciable way with tiny incremental Comfort Plus sales on the margins for middle seats.

This sets the stage for First Class seat selection in First "Classic."

Of course, because that's how all basic has worked (aside from the occasional sale matching Spirit).

This new bucket is just another form of drip pricing. A way to display a lower price on a search page that draws a consumer in only to realize it's less than he thought he was bargaining for. But there's an innate bias toward continuing with the transaction once you've started moving through it. It's the same reason why every other business wants to advertise a bargain basement price and the tack on fee after fee during the transaction flow. Delta is now just a fancier Allegiant.

Who remembers the WILMA (window then middle then aisle) boarding order? Under that old system, who would choose a middle seat to board sooner and have a better chance of ovehead bin space? This could be part of a target audience for Comfort Basic. Actually Comfott Basic is better in this regard because the jump up in boarding group is much more than for WILMA.

Yes I did that. Chose a middle seat (on United, no window seats left) to get an earlier boarding group when they used the WILMA system.

Since FC upgrades are now effectively impossible due to WFBC monetization strategy, the obvious next step is applying this model to Comfort or Premium Select cabins.

I stopped expecting any kind of upgrade from Main years ago as I flip-flopped between GM and FO flying mainly domestic U.S. in Main/"Economy Discomfort", although they happened a fair amount of the time. As others mention upstream, it will be effective at getting kettles or infrequent flyers to spend more for what they think is a premium product, thus taking away more free upgrade inventory. Even if that product is an effectively marginal few inches more legroom while sharing armrests, and a bag of 0.5oz of premium kettle chips (no pun) instead of a Biscoff.

Whenever I do need Comfort or PS, it's on long-haul international usually paid for with cash money or sometimes miles, and in seats I select - away from toilets.

This seems like a move meant for investor day and earnings calls to keep the big investors on board by saying "we are now selling stuff that we used to give away". Yet it is really just a financial shell game when these seats are being sold for less than regular main cablin.
The reality is that these "basic" customers book later (who wants to book a flight with a change fee that far in advance) and probably will have zero impact on PM and DM upgrades at booking because the PM and DM...

• Book sooner
• Will book a middle C+ seat only if traveling with a companion and the window or aisle is open
• Will take an exit row if C+ is booked.

They seem to have struggled finding upfare price points for Comfort fares. As noted upthread, for awhile earlier this year, they were charging absurdly high differentials to upfare from Main to Comfort. I checked historical fare filings on ExpertFlyer and they seem to have peaked around spring/early summer before retreating again. Basic to Main fare differentials have barely moved during that time typically running $30 - $50 each-way, domestically. Perhaps this will help them goose Comfort sales somewhat, but who knows.

Here's a few routes with example Main to Comfort Classic upfare pricing one-way.
January June Today
DTW-LAX +$110 +$150 +$90
DTW-MCI +$50 +$90 +$30
DTW-BOS +$60 +$150 +$50

The DCA-MIA poster child route started the year very high at +$150 and has been falling ever since. It fell all the way down to +$30 for Main to Comfort Classic sometime in August and has been there ever since even with introduction of Comfort Basic fares on route.