hirohito888

That doesn't make much sense, UA markets "United Business" fares to CUN, PVR, PUJ, etc. And those are leisure markets.

It is strange why PDL is marketed as PP instead of Business. I have a flight to PDL in a few days in PP, so I'll report how it goes.

JimInOhio

Is think the difference is due to transatlantic (of some sort) vs Mexico/Carribean. No one expects lie-flat seats to CUN no matter what it's called but to PDL they might if it's labeled as Business.

MBS MillionMiler

JimInOhio and Cris put it more succinctly than I did. Tempering expectations for Polaris admission, other on-the-ground expectations as well as in the air.

FoxFlyer

Given this weird distinction, does it mean this is a CPU eligible flight? Or if you want to use +pts, how many would it be?

mahasamatman

Difficult? Three lines of code max.

Cris

No, it's considered long haul. Should be 20, but could be wrong.

RobOnLI

It's 20 PlusPoints to upgrade from any economy fare to Premium Plus. Note: Basic Economy need not apply; you can't use PlusPoints or miles to upgrade a BE ticket (in case some forget this rule).

-RM

hirohito888

I wonder if the marketing terms PP vs. Business is because that this route is TATL and part of the A* TATL JV. And to keep things consistent (like sharing revenue), I think they had to pick Y-O-J. If they chose J, then prices would have been too high or maybe skew their J TATL seat capacity. Or you get really low fares and feasibly have passengers do some backtrack routing like EWR-FRA-PDL and take up inventory. With O,A,R fares, you're really limited to this single route, since LH/LX only fly Y-J to PDL seasonally.

Although same could be said about EWR-KEF, but maybe KEF is a more premium market for J, I dunno.

Fare structures and prices aside, I guess UA can always "call" it Business, just like Domestic First.

VFR

Each of the transatlantic joint businesses have minimum standards for each cabin. To market a transatlantic product as "business" usually requires a lie-flat seat. So it makes sense to have the recliner product be premium economy.

Delta tried ticketing domestic connections to international premium economy in domestic first when they introduced premium economy. It didn't seem to take, and they now book domestic connections into Comfort+. Since UA books domestic connections into into B, I think Premiers might be eligible for instant upgrades?

DELee

Yeah - even if we pay for business, UA still gives us the "business".

David

Punekar

The way an airline assigns a booking class for a connecting flight before or after international premium economy (or any cabin) is done through the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO)'s system (technically, a table called RBD Chart 1). This way it flows through to all possible booking channels/GDSs. It is not done via a snippet of website code. While it wouldn't be impossible to implement a distinct rule for flights where PE is the highest cabin, it would be a lot more than three lines of code, and I imagine it would require UA's RM team to closely work with the scheduling team- something that doesn't usually happen at large airlines, I would hazard a guess. Much easier for UA, or any airline, to have one rule for all international.

findark

It's almost certainly because it's a TATL sector, so selling it as Business would open a large can of worms (it's not "real business, despite everyone else flying lie-flat; if using the J-scale for inventory you open up questions like do you only allow routing on this specific flight, which gets messy if you start operating more flights like this, etc).

Delta did it first (flying domestic aircraft TATL and selling it as PE).

Right - the issue is how do you distinguish? You would probably have to write a delegate rule like " P PERMITTED WHEN AVAILABLE ... UA R- FARES WITHIN AREA 1" and make sure you carefully template it only to PDL fares, and then consider what to do about SFO-EWR-PDL or other domestic routes where PE is available. Not saying it's impossible, but definitely tricky. Subset-templating like that is very prone to error, as one template can often overwrite the other (most unrelatedly, this caused a bug where you could route SFO-EWR-DCA for the price of an SFO-WAS differential fare - believe this is still possible). And it would massive confuse other people flying PE in the same market.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

This makes sense, but the lounge situation (e.g. EWR-YYZ gets access, but EWR-Azores nominally does not) is inconsistent with UA's current x-border policy. Will UA make a special exception for PE customers to/from Azores?

findark

I rather doubt it, and I suspect the willingness to fly a domestic-equipped frame and do PE marketing is based on it being a lower-yield leisure destination.

wpcoe

Are they short-changing expectations in that "true" Premium Plus seats have leg rests, while these EWR-PDL flights' Premium Plus don't have leg rests?