Concur rules are customizable and I have direct knowledge of the rules for specific company being referenced as the result of a benchmarking exercise.

The entire purpose of Concur is to function as compliance software. It is entirely programmable and that is why businesses use it.

When someone tells you that he hates Concur because it makes him take one flight or another, he is complaining about his employer not his employer's software.

Yup, it's a fare increase that causes me to go through an extra process step every time I travel for work to get it approved. I always get it approved; but it's a waste of time and resources for myself and my organization and I'm starting to fill like a jerk even submitting for it.

And no, I've never been the lowest price ticket buyer. Never mileage ran in my life. Last year I ended at about 120,000 miles and $30,000 in spend. 90% of my travel is for work and is generally purchased about a week out from travel date.

The fact that UA wants an extra $40 from me (my employer) so I can select a seat when I'm booking a $1,000 t-con is just too much. I'm 6'3" so E+ access matters.

I've maintained that I understand why BE exists and on routes that they compete directly against NK, F9, B6 and other true LCCs (maybe WN on hyper competitive routes) it makes sense. But that's the fundamental difference between DL's implementation and UAs. I don't like DL's implementation of BE but when I'm already giving them a wheelbarrow full of cash they don't ask me for an extra $40 so I can buy some lube to make the pounding less painful.

And it's not like UA has such a vastly superior product, service, or really, anything.

We can end the thread now. There is nothing more to be said

Honestly, this is the part I don't get. First of all, that's on your employer, who apparently values $40 more than the time it takes you to fill out the paperwork, your manager / approver to approve it, the travel and compliance team to review it, etc.

Second, I keep seeing this weird fantasy where all airfare automatically costs exactly the same amount. Perhaps that's true on the routes that some people fly, but for me, that's rarely the case. Sure, they'll often be close, but day-to-day inventory variance wins out. I've found days when UA is $100 more expensive than their competition, and I've found days when UA is $100 less than their competition -- just because somebody in Revenue Management did or didn't open up the W bucket on a given flight.

So, if you have to fill out paperwork every time you spend $40 more than the minimum, did you never have to fill out the same paperwork before? Here, let's use the specific SFO-SEA example that I see on this thread all the time. 7 days out, Tuesday to Friday -- and, hey, UA even killed BE. Assuming your travel policy won't force you to take F9 through DEN -- at $328, it's the lowest price I see on ITA -- then you get a choice of a lot of flights at $343. But the earliest flight is AS at $385. In fact, all of AS's flights before 11:40 AM are $385. So, if you wanted to fly AS, and you didn't want to waste the day in the airport, you'd have to get special approval?

Most, if not all travel policies and the software that applies them apply head-to-head. NS flights are compared to other NS, and then only within a time window. E.g. A good friend can pay more for a desired flight time that is more than a few hours difference in time. So he can avoid United at $149 at 7 pm, and take the AS flight for $199 at 5:30 pm. What he can't do is then pay DL $249 to fly on their 5:25 pm flight.

Likewise connecting routings that involve more time can be avoided.

This said, on some high frequency routes (e.g. SFO-LAX, SFO-SEA) with multiple airlines, the fares are often very closely aligned, so that a BE upcharge will push a trip out of compliance.

I for one would be POed if an employee was paying United any extra $800 of my money (20 upsells to avoid BE) vs just flying another airline. I know I laughed, and laughed, and laughed when United wanted $120 RT extra to avoid BE on a recent family trip. We just booked OALs for the same $$$, but better service.

And I would consider it an $800 investment in that employee's morale, particularly if I were asking him to travel 20 times per year.

^ Almost every time I read about BE complaints, pricing is placed into this utopian vacuum of continuous price matching. Reality is more often not the case, and sometime it's not even close. Also, the BE price should not be assumed to be the "what Y would have been" price. And when BE is matched by another carrier's Y, we don't know who is matching who, so we can't say BE is a price increase. Instead it could be that BE is a discount fare that was matched. So who's to blame now?

The bottom line is that whenever a customer isn't buying solely based on best overall value, they are paying more to be loyal. The only difference with BE is that's more visible.

Really? You will often glowingly state how much more you pay to fly DL over UA or other airlines. So how is that okay to you, but paying for UA upsells isn't?

And leads to another unanswered point. How did the business customer suddenly become highly price-sensitive? I thought it was about network, product, and perks, not price.

When I do ita matrix searches, I keep running into attractive-looking UA fares that turn out to be BE. The upsell to regular economy is usually $40 ow. Since I don't want to fly BE, and the $40 premium makes the fare unattractive, I usually just pass and wait for the next deal.

But I think I'm somewhat unusual. I think most people shopping for flights "need" to travel on specific itineraries more than I do, and when faced with this choice will buy the BE fare. In other words, the upsell won't work: there's just not enough value in paying $80 to avoid BE. Logic tells me the upsell should be less. At $10, almost everyone buys. At $15, most do. At $20, at least half. But I bet by the time you get to $40, most either keep shopping or buy BE. I guess this is what UA is going to have to figure out. And, heck, maybe I'm not a good judge of airline consumer buying habits.

This x1000

How much of your employees fully burdened time does it take to add up to $800?

Why don't you trivially exclude BE fares on UA?

There's a psychological component to the whole thing that's a little weird for me. Some of the regular G fares actually seem quite good, but I'm put off by seeing BE for $40 less. I'd be more likely to purchase if they didn't offer BE as a comparison point.

This is especially the case on the fares where they're trying to match the ULCCs. I will absolutely pay UA $40 more than the NK/G4/F9 fare, because I will never fly those airlines absent some very unusual circumstance. I never even consider what their fare is; in fact, I frequently will exclude them from searches entirely. But it feels different to pay UA $40 more than its own fare.

It's also strange on a percentage basis. I'd think $40 would be less noticeable on a $600 fare than a $60 fare -- some people's travel policies aside. But apparently UA has reached the opposite conclusion.

I think that's a big part of the outsized negative reaction here. Everyone feels disadvantaged when they see the fare spread, even those who don't buy these fares.

A mere $40 fare increase would not have sparked a 177 page thread.

Interesting data point - to "upgrade" out of BE is only $30 RT for EWR-SFO (March 2018).

I'm not so sure about that. A few years ago, a fare increase would have been $5 or $10, not $40. And people were sometimes up in arms about that. And in some years, many of those minor increases failed if the carrier that initiated wasn't matched by all of the competitors.

Im not thrilled with the potentially higher prices on the routes im flying, either. However, I'm also able to look at it in context. I fly to YYZ a lot, where I'm used to higher fares which haven't seemed to increase much - that's because they've always been high. I'm also in CVG, which was one of the highest cost airports to fly out of in the US for years - always in the top 5, often number 2 or so. Until F9, Allegiant, and now WN have come in (and DL reduced service), and in the case of the former 2, with major increases in routes/frequencies. I've never flown them, but UAs prices has been lower as a result. For the July long weekend, I flew RT to SFO for $400 R/T - haven't seen a fare that low there (and I fly to Bay Area 3-4 times per year ) in at least 5+ years - typically, it was close to $600. So even with the 'increase', in many cases, still paying less than before. If we're going to talk about fare levels changing, we have to talk about it as a whole, not just the increases without the other side.

I'm not talking about fare levels changing. As I said before, that would not have sparked a 177 page thread. Fares go up and down, that's their nature.

I'm talking about seeing the spread between BE and regular economy when you run a search. That seems to cause a widespread negative reaction. My personal reaction is:

1. I'm annoyed, because the "lowest fare" that led me to click is an inferior product that I absolutely will not purchase.

2. I'm annoyed, because I don't even want to see these fares.

3. I'm annoyed, because it reminds me that UA has raised the fare and then lied that this is about giving passengers "more choices" as opposed to simply being a revenue grab. I don't so much mind the fare increase, but I resent being lied to.

4. I'm saddened, because this is just further stratification of the flying public, which I find dehumanizing and which actually has an impact on how people treat one another.

Yes, I'm seeing the spread drop to $15 OW on many routes.