belynch

Saw a fare on the ua.com matrix today that only offered BE. Not regular economy, refundable, or F (it was mainline).

Since we've removed BE from our corporate booking engine I was curious why I couldn't get the flight pairing I wanted to show-up. And now I know why. What on earth is UA doing here?

mduell

Did you already pick BE on the prior segment? If so, you can only book BE from there on out.

spin88

On the routes I fly, United appears to be slowly backing down (coming in off the cliff? ) on BE.

I was looking at SFO-PHX again, two weeks out, and while United was trying to sell a BE two weeks ago (and I just skipped them, flew AA) now - two weeks out, and on a o/w fare of $139 UA is matching AA's regular economy with a regular economy. No more "Loyalty Tax" if I fly UA.

This said, United is still trying to extract a loyalty tax in the highly competitive SFO-SEA market. Looking two weeks out, Delta has BE only at the lowest $58 o/w price point (it is $68 o/w to avoid BE), while United has a much larger $20 price spread, and demands that up to a fare of $123 for BE (regular Y is $143). And at the lowest fare ($59) United then wants $20 more for Y, meaning they are noncompetitive there as well.

One can see what was coming in what Kirby said on the 2Q call (transcript from Seeking Alpha), which really surprised me. It appears that United went into this w/o thinking clearly about what would happen if others did not follow, and after 3 months, still has no real metrics on how book away was damaging them. Check the bolded parts in particular.

Kirby: "But I think by the end of the year, we’ll have a position where everyone of the big network fares presumably will have rolled out basic economy around their system and at that point, I think basic economy will be more of a tailwind. It’s less of a tailwind right now, because on some of our competitors, the standard, you can get the standard product on our competitors for the same products that we get the basic product on United Airlines. That won’t be the case in the long run, but in the near term, we get benefits from selling up more customers, but I’m sure we lose some share as a result of that as well.”

Jamie Baker: “but I’m curious what the basic economy RASM contribution is as it relates to the third quarter guide for flat domestic RASM. We were assure the basic economy was going to be immediately accretive, at least I think that’s what you said. So I’m wondering if that has proven to be the case, it would suggest that absent basic economy, your domestic RASM would actually be going down and I’m not sure that I understand what that would be?

Scott Kirby

So, on basic economy, I do expect it will be RASM accretive and immediately RASM accretive with its competitive product. And we said that exactly in the past, but that would have been the underlying assumption that it was going to be competitive and expected our competitors to get the full workout, but currently, they have taken longer. I still think they’re going to get there, but in the near term, you know, the upside that we get from upsell is offset, it’s impossible for us to make sure, but I’m sure it’s offset to a larger, maybe a complete degree by share shift. And so if we’ve been through any of the forecast, it’s probably what our competitors are going to do. We don’t know that. We can’t control that. And we’ll get bigger benefits once we roll that everywhere.

P.S. I appreciate Kirby's honesty, but as an investor it would make me very uncomfortable that they went into such a big change in how they did business w/o very careful modeling about what the impact of trying to tax loyalty would be in book away.

aacharya

It seems so interesting (Kirby's comments), when he'd have had first-hand knowledge of how AA would've reacted. But maybe that's why AA did what it did.

belynch

Nope.
Every other option in the matrix showed the usual hodge-podge of availability.

belynch

I think their model assumed DL and AA would have it universally rolled out by now, which is why Kirby said what he did on the call.

If everyone taxes their loyalty the same then they've successfully enacted a not insignificant fare increase while showing up competitive on the search matrices against the LCCs. Let's not discount that Wall Street loved the idea of BE.

But their model fell apart when DL maintained limiting BE fares only against lower fare classes and AA is route selective.

My personal investor thesis is UA has seen corporate booking attrition due to this, which is why they had near-term solid earnings for Q2 but expressed reservations for Q3+. They're effectively engaging in a giant game of chicken with AA and DL into what implementation of BE the market will hold long-term and the longer UA is the outlier the more customers are punishing them by booking elsewhere.

Either UA is completely incompetent (I don't subscribe to that) or the aberrations we've seen in the BE pricing beginning on 7/1 are an indication that UA is trying to figure out how they can optimize BE while remaining competitive as they saw something in their Q2 roll-up that gave them significant pause of the screw 'em all strategy of their original BE roll-out.

The clock is ticking on them figuring this out quickly as they're now 1/3rd of the way through Q3 and from what I can see BE is still a mess and AA and DL aren't flinching.

Kacee

Error. I see BE fare errors in virtually every search when BE is an option.

jsloan

Agreed. When another poster showed a similar anomaly, it was because of some kind of combinability glitch. You can book the flight in regular economy, but UA has put some kind of block in place in their UI to prevent massive price discrepancies from appearing. Multi-city search will likely cause that combination to appear.

spin88

I agree with you on what is likely going on (corporate book away) due to UA showing up higher in fare metrixs as people figure out the game United is playing. But I find it hard to believe that United figured that Delta - with several years of using BE more limited - would just go along. Delta has to compete against AS/VX, and they have years of data on this. They are also on the top of their game right now, and what likes like it happened - Delta using this as a way of vacuuming up more high value traffic - getting people upset about United wanting a loyalty tax to try Delta, and AAL being slow to see how it went, was entirely predicable.

I think in part this is what we are seeing in the PRASM guidance for 3Q 2017, where AAL is +1.5 (TRASM, midpoint), Delta is +3.5%, and United is flat.

But call me surprised that Kirby admitted that he had no figures on Book away, and was just making assumptions. That seems really crazy to me, almost malpractice.

Sykes

What do you mean by AA not flinching? AA announced in it's investor briefings that they plan to roll Basic Economy out nationwide (on all domestic routes) by the end of September:

https://thepointsguy.com/2017/07/aa-...tionwide-sept/

It'll be interesting to see how the specifics differ from United's implementation.

spin88

How BE is done is the kicker.

On United is goes to relatively high fare categories, not just deep discount tickets, and requires a rather steep (often $20) upcharge to avoid. That impacts a LOT of people/routes

Delta has had BE for years, but unless you are buying deep discount tickets long in advance, on most routes you don't see it. My example above, from SEA-SEA shows this. DL has some $59 BE fares, with regular Y being $69, United has BEs from $59 to $129, and the upcharge is $20.

Plus delta gives you status credit, and lets you being a carry on, United does neither of these things.

AAL was very clear they were not telling on their 2Q 2017 Call as to whether they were going to stick with the DL approach as they have been doing:

Darryl Genovesi - UBS Securities LLC

Okay. And I guess United initially rolled out its Basic Economy product all the way up and down the fare ladder while I think Delta's was only at the bottom three rungs, and as I understand it your Basic Economy product looks more like Delta's than it does United's. If the primary objective of Basic Economy is to segment the market in such a way as to compete with the ultra-low-cost carriers without diluting the Premium fare from the late booking business traveler, then don't you need to offer Basic Economy all the way up to zero-day APE (22:58)? And assuming that's correct, does your Basic Economy product as you've structured it today prevent you from being able to do that?

Donald B. Casey - American Airlines, Inc.

Okay, this is Don Casey. When we roll out our entire product, you'll see exactly how we think the appropriate way to structure the products, so we're not going to disclose exactly how we're going to implement it. So I think it's a bit too soon to judge exactly what our plan is.

(from 2Q call transcript put up by Seeking Alpha). Others may disagree, but I see Casey's blow off of the assertion that AA should follow UA to be very telling. Given UA's problems, I just don't see this happening.

If I am Kirby, I began to figure out how to roll-back BE to something more like DL, I don't keep loosing market share....

belynch

The route was ROC - PBI out on 8/8 return on 8/10.
I took a picture of it and sbm12 tried to replicate it and got the exact same flights to show with BE blocked out but every other option available.

To go back to my comment about this specific example -- one could chalk it up to incompetence on UAs part (and maybe that's the case) or it could be an error caused by changes in fare basis and me hitting the data base call at the right moment. Or something else. All I know is the flights I wanted weren't showing in my corporate booking engine and when I went onto UA.com to try and figure it out I saw what was happening. Not sure many other users would take that step.

All they see is the raw data.

What they aren't seeing is the thought process on the booking behaviors and why people are or are not booking on them. No one at UA has called me to ask why I've taken only one trip in the last 8 weeks on UA with only a one way booked in the future when I generally travel every other week. Is it seasonal? Did I have a job change? Another kid? Or am I just flying a lot of other carriers. They don't have the data nor is it feasible for them to get it unless they issue a survey and a meaningful response-set truthfully responds to it. It'll take time for them to get the booking behavior feedback dialed-in (at which point a lot of ships may have already sailed).

As much as I want Kirby to get a big piece of humble pie based on how he's implemented BE I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this. Although I also don't think they're actively trying to get the data they need right now.

That's the kicker. I think their ambiguity is based on seeing what's happening with DL's implementation vs UA's and adjusting accordingly for optimization.

The cynic in me says they have enough meaningful data that they're re-adjusting how they thought they were going to implement BE and A) they don't want to give UA any advanced notice to keep them on the game of chicken longer and B) they aren't 100% sure how they're going to do it because the assumptions made are proving to be wrong.

If i'm AA and I'm picking-up 2% of UA's last minute purchases because people don't want to deal with BE on a $900 ticket; that's meaningful revenue, margin, and an opportunity to build a loyalty relationship with someone who might have been previously very loyal to a competitor. And yes, people are walking away from UA on these tickets because of BE. It's all anecdotal but the one-off data points are becoming consistent enough to see a trend forming (the 2% number is total me pulling a number out of my arse though).

jsloan

Yeah, I'm not able to replicate that either. Furthermore, your corporate booking portal absolutely should have been able to get a regular economy fare for any valid set of flights. Even if it doesn't show on United.com, you should have been able to price the flights. You might not have liked the price that came back, but you should have gotten a price.

All United is doing is suppressing the display of that price on the website when conditions warrant. Why it does that, I can't say.

Note that there are plenty of other mistakes too -- for example, there's a two-stop routing ROC-ORD-EWR-PBI with a fare break in ORD. United will offer you a BE fare for $701 or a regular economy fare for $637 (listed price as part of a RT) or $682 (one way). That... doesn't seem right. :-)

spin88

I agree that AA is watching how this has played out, and went with the DL conservative approach in a wait and see. This said, the airlines do have the ability to determine - if they want - what flyers patterns are, as they can buy data on travel spending from the CC companies and see what is happening to their elite customers (whose UA spending they know). I don't think they can get the data atomized (by vendor) but they can see the book away pattern if they want to look (percent of total spending UA is getting), or as you say, run a special survey.

I get the idea that United so wanted this to work, and they were so certain that what the analyists were pushing was a good idea, they have been operating on faith with BE. It's back to Jeff's management approach of adding up the extra revenue on a spreadsheet, w/o understanding the impacts, and it has shaken my faith that Kirby understands much beyond operations.

This said, I have the same buying pattern you have (have avoided UA when BE was in play, i.e. on nearly every flight) and I can't be the only one.

bldr1k

United's approach on BE is moronic and is going to hurt them.

BE is fine on the low-end fares that are needed to compete. However, the first time someone buys a $700 one way E or M fare that is basic economy, will be the last. This is an insanely stupid way of pissing of your high-value fliers.