halls120

LOL, if your SO is not spontaneous, booking three months out is the norm.

Kacee

Yes and this absolutely UA's modus operandi right now. Seeing it on all carriers right now, occasionally some lower fares mostly on WN. Very very different from what we've seen through most of the pandemic in terms of airfare pricing.

Would not recommend waiting to purchase in the hope that fare will drop closer in . Odds are very high the fares will go the other way. Flights are going out full.

WineCountryUA

My operating mode now is to book as soon as have reasonable plans and then rebook if needed or refare if possible as time gets closer. More work but $0 change fees and ability to use credits on other flights makes this work for me. All I see for my late summer, early fall trips are rising prices.

For now, the previous 1-4 month out as best price point is completely upside down (and not just UA), The airlines have figure that is now the peak purchase period and are pricing accordingly. This may collapse if consumers demur due to high prices but so far the airlines seem to be winning

HNLbasedFlyer

I think the Big 3 have written a new playbook - rather than striving for 100% load factors with a lot of deeply discounted fares they'll accept lower load factors but with higher average fares and leave the deep discounts to the LCC's.

Kacee

I'm doing about 10 flights per month and not seeing these flights with lower load factors. All mine are 100% full.

findark

There is another major wrench in the works not being considered here - normally a flight at 40 to 50 percent load 21 days out is heavily sold, because a majority of bookings (and even more profitable ones) occur less than 21 days before departure... or at least they did, back when business travel was at normal levels. RM is heavily model-driven, and the computer models are mostly based on a much heavier business-to-leisure ratio, so all airlines are scrambling to recalibrate models and expectations of what sales curves should look like in a world where there is sky-high leisure demand and depressed business demand (how do you market segregate to get some vacationers to take over the burden of making things run by buying Y/B/M fares?).

There are obviously a lot of humans working to calibrate as well, but if you have to err, often better to still have some space leftover than the other way around (especially with all the schedule trimming going on).

fumje

I'm seeing some strange things here and there, like flight inventory being J3 with load 16/20, J2 with load 41/44, or even J1 with load 25/28 (no blocks). I haven't poked around too much to see how widespread it is, but it seems like if inventory gets to C0, then they reduce J below capacity (i.e. if inventory is JxC0 with x>0, then the load will be at most capacity-x-1).

Clemson

I booked most of my flights for the year in the first few months of the year and am glad I did so. Have tracked each in google flights since and very few have dipped below what I paid for. Most are $100-$200more and while they do go up and down frequently, have not come close to what I originally paid. With change fees being 0 there's really no reason not to book now and re-book later if the price does go down.

prestonh

Idk if it's a paradox. If you originally booked a nonrefundable fare, then referred lower, ua still has all of your fare, it's just given you a ffc. Then ua sells the higher fare you had to someone else and has more money than they would have had would you not have refared and they sold someone else the lower fare.

Lux Flyer

I suppose the calculation has had to change in terms of still having all of your fare, that with no domestic originating change fees and therefore no $50 refaring fee, it makes more sense to refare (previously you would be out either the change fee, or the refare fee, so the savings would have to be greater than that.)

But the issue I was bringing up is UA doesn't necessarily sell the higher fare you had. The (exaggerated) paradox I was invisioning: you have an H fare and UA is trying to sell H fares, no one is buying, so they open up T availability. You refare to a T fare, thus eating up that inventory and driving them back to selling H fares that they couldn't sell before (which is why they opened T in the first place). So instead of having you at an H fare and someone new at a T fare, they only have you at a T-fare with a FFC for your H-fare, and no one new at the H-fare because they can't sell H-fares. Obviously an extreme scenario with drastic changes in the fare levels to illustrate the point.

This leads to the conclusion though that refaring is not by-and-large being used. Opening T-inventory becuase you can't sell H-inventory means demand for H-inventory isn't there, someone refaring to T from H doens't suddenly create new demand for H-inventory, so realistically you'd need to keep additional T-inventory open to still draw new passengers to book, since that is where you think the demand is at. If refaring was being done by the majority of passengers system wide, the net effect is everyone ends up in the lowest possible fare buckets

HNLbasedFlyer

Interesting - mine are not - not even close.

absdotan99

I have been monitoring flights from TLV to EWR, ORD, and IAD with many of them J=9 and no availability in DCZP. Some flights show half of the seats taken (however, this is not a true estimate of the booked seats). I would definitely think UA is manually controlling the buckets to ramp revenue. They have figured that there are business passengers that will always pay full fare (J) and eventually book a seat.

zombietooth

All of my flights last week were 100% full (8 segments) and only 1 UG that I saw.

Kacee

17 on the standby list last night for PHX-SFO, GA announced "we have seats for most of you." I seriously can't remember last time I was on a flight with empty seats. (There was 1 gate upgrade, I died at #1, sat in row 10 with Mr. Too Much Cologne in the middle next to me.)

fumje

They are definitely being tight with inventory in many places, I assume to address high demand and price insensitivity.

However, the strange thing about J being capped below capacity is, if anything, it would seem to preserve battlefield upgrade space, leaving one or two seats open for when the door closes. I can't imagine that is their intention, though, but I also can't think of what other purpose it serves.