FLYDCA

This will be true for many business travelers who have no choice on where to book. Your company can fine tune Egencia or another booking tool to offer more fare choices but it's unlikely that many corporate travel departments will willingly allow travelers to pick higher fares.

tods27

For my work, we had a warning in our previous booking system (getthere.net with BCD travel doing bookings) about the DL fares that was on the main login screen. We just moved my company to Concur and there isn't any warning. I'm not sure if the DL E fares are filtered out or not.

My concern is that UA will not make these easy to filter out making it an extra pain for business travelers. This, of course, assumes that the new fares would apply to the times that I'm traveling for business and that my company actually gets Concur to filter them out.

rittenhousesq

So will this just be a stealth way for UA to raise their economy fares?. Will what is now the cheapest economy fare simply become the new "no frills" fare and thus will one have to buy a more expensive (than what is currently offered) fare in order to get E+ seating and other benefits?

mduell

Will vary by market. In markets where they're matching ULCC fares today, expect Budget Economy fares to do that instead. In other markets, Budget Economy will be less than the lowest fare now.

gglave

This is exactly what Air Canada did - I'm sure United watched what AC did with interest.

To earn 100% qualifying miles, get advance seat selection, if gold - get a 'preferred' seat (think E+) have an upgrade etc. option you had to buy a "Flex" economy fare.

The base "Tango" fare offered none of these.

On a typical Vancouver - Toronto return trip, Flex is about ~$150 USD more.

At my office Concur only selects Tango fares for business travel.

gglave

3 weeks in advance + roundtrip are not barriers to the majority of my business trips. I'll earn UA Gold this year and I'd say 95% of my trips would meet these criteria.

The Saturday night obviously would be, but I have to assume if UA follows AC's path this will be the first requirement to disappear.

gglave

Maybe I'm unique, but I rarely have to change my tickets - And when this topic comes up in other similar discussions I suspect I'm not unique.

1353513636

What would motivate UA to make these fares difficult to filter out? If they make it really hard to book a non basic economy ticket, isn't that just kissing revenue goodbye?

mduell

It's mostly on the TAs to make them easy to filter, and the buyers to choose that filtering. Booking through UA directly will no doubt be easy to filter.

saFlyTalk

I'd guess that using strictly the N fare class to denote basic economy would make the process of filtering by corporate booking engines relatively painless.

gglave

Corporate booking systems steer fliers to the cheapest ticket open - So no great need to filter them out.

UA wants you to book through their site anyway.

ftweb

This is highly situation dependent, but I can't say that I agree with this statement. My employer highly encourages non-refundable tickets, and I require it of anyone I manage. Say the average domestic round-trip fare we pay (with our corporate discount) is $400, and we have to pay a $200 change fee. People might change their tickets about 10% of the time, so this effectively adds an average of $20 per ticket, which is way less than refundable fares would.

In the case of budget fares, with no change fees, let's say the whole $400 would be lost, so now this adds effectively $40/ticket instead of $20. What that means is that if the Budget fares save more than $20 compared to the nonrefundable fares, then they are probably worth it in terms of flight expenses.

Now where the budget fares might not be worth it is in terms of time and convenience for employees. What happens very often is that I fly somewhere, finish my meeting early or get to the airport faster than anticipated, and then standby for a slightly earlier flight home. The budget fares will almost certainly not allow this. Now the question is whether employers pay an extra $30 for people to have this flexibility, which is hard to justify on strictly financial terms--it's more about morale.

That said, UA presumably doesn't want business travelers buying budget fares, and they have multiple tools at their disposal to ensure this doesn't happen. For instance, they could institute a Saturday stay requirement. They could exempt budget fares from corporate discounts. They could say budget fares don't count towards the minimum spend amount required by most corporate discount contracts. So there's no need to freak out yet, as this could still work out and even improve things. (E.g., maybe it means we can still get aisle seats when booking only a few days inadvance--something that seems to have gotten better recently anyway.)

Kacee

For hourly billers - including lawyers, consultants, and accountants, "inconvenience" translates directly into client dollars. Typically lots of them.

I explain to my clients that hard travel costs are in most cases incidental compared to the costs of my time. Make me wait three hours at the airport rather than getting on the earlier flight that's departing right now? That's probably going to cost the client 2x (or more) the price of the entire ticket.

ftweb

Not everyone can bill for travel time unless they are working for the client while traveling. I find it harder to get work done at a gate, compared to once I'm on the plane. I don't doubt that for some people including you budget fares will not make sense on purely financial terms, but I suspect it's a minority of UA's flyers and UA will need to employ other tools to prevent people from booking these.

cesco.g

Interestingly I noticed, how certain flights show lower booking classes sold out, yet the lowest fare class "N" still is available. Example:

UA 373 IAH - IAD
08/17/16 11:50 AM
08/17/16 4:00 PM 739

F9 C9 A9 D9 Z8 P7 Y9 B9 M9 E9 U9 H9 Q9 V9 W9 S0 T0 L0 K0 G0 N9

In this case S, T, L, K and G are "0", while N is still "9".