They are preparing for this already. Got this in an e-mail from Finnair.

"Finnair is preparing to launch a new travel class, Premium Economy to our offering in 2021 and to ensure that we are able to start selling this new travel class, we need to make technical changes to our booking class structure.

Therefore, four booking classes, P, T, W and R, will be taken out of our inventory to make room for the upcoming Premium Economy bookings.
(...) We hereby inform you that as of 1st of April 2019, any of the applicable of the four booking classes (P, T, W and R) will no longer be available."

Seems like they are running out of letters indeed...

Oh no! RVAXXX was my favourite fare basis! :D

Bing! You have been upgraded!

I highly doubt Finnair is in a market position to simply remove the lowest fare class altogether because of the new Premium Economy class and only sell more expensive Y tickets in the future. (Otherwise they would have removed R class already previously or increased fares). So most likely there will be a new booking class that replaces R or there will be cheaper Q tickets available.

Indeed, R.I.P RVA2FI

Very interesting communications! Any idea why you've got this? Do you have such tickets in the far future? Or are you an agent?


Not quite sure what to make of this.
It looks like they remove the two lowest fares plus the two lowest value-only fares. If the structure is kept there of course will be re-positioning of the remaining buckets, but it could mean that LI will be available even at high loads. (today, LI exists in 8 of 12 buckets, after change if no alterations it will be in 6 of 8 buckets - not counting the PR only buckets)
I wonder if LI/BA/VA/PR is going to survive. It seems this is a time to remove the types altogether, since they cannot use them on a large number of destinations anyway.

Also interesting if they are reserving 4 buckets for such a small part of the cabin.

I assume there will adjustments. The lowest price is not determined by a letter but by market.
There might just be fewer steps in the price scale. For example, if 12 buckets covered a span of 32-420 € (base fare for HEL-ARN at some point in time) and those fares are still relevant to the market, then 8 buckets will span approx 32-420€ in the future.

That was a mailout to their corporate customers.

I think they are needed. Most probably W for full-fare premium economy, one for "Value" premium economy, one for "Basic" premium economy and one for premium economy campaigns.

Yeah, you are right.
With one gone for "full fare", there are 3 left for different price points. If they anticipate high "volatility" or high price-spread, 3 steps are not much. In Y, lowest to highest bucket is at least 10x. But in Y+ fares most often must be squeezed in between typical Y and J pricing so the spread is likely less wide.

But I am not convinced LI/BA/VA is going to exist in Y+. I think 1 full-flex, 2 "flex" and 1 "saver".
Also, how can they differentiate in earnings?! If PR and BU-saver is kept there is not many meaningful earning slots in between. You can't really have a Y+ BA at 167% and a Y+ VA at 175% and a Y+ PR at 187% - to little difference to appeal.

So I think they need to a major shake-up in all fare- and earnings-structure in order to make this new cabin work.

Are there no AY codeshares with P.E. outside the transatlantic and transiberian cartels?

AY already uses T for discount P.E. on transatlantic routes. I don't know what other codes are used, but from the codeshare earning table, I can guess they are P, E and W.

With that said, I am not sure why they need to reassign R, but it is true that they officially already use all letters except E (which I guess is for internal fares). U and X are for awards, F is for upgrades and all other 22 Latin letters else is assigned in earning tables.

Campaign W will probably be replaced by regular discount economy codes and a different fare basis. Wasn't the zero already used for that purpose? One less fare code for discount enomy, and two (out of four) for semi-flexible economy leaving only K and M there.

Currently, Economy earns 25/50/100/150 % while Business class always earns 200 %. My guess is that Premium Economy will have default 150 % earnings, with campaigns at 100 %.

If current codeshare earnings are any indication, PE will earn 100% regardless of flexibility. But yeah, it seems reasonable to assume that "Premium Pro" will earn 150% like regular Pro.

An interesting glitch is that feeders for (codeshare) PE flights seem to book into Y at the moment. I would have expected M or K.