American Airlines Makes Pricing Less Transparent, Hides Basic Economy

American Airlines has just made updates to how it displays fares through both its website and app, as flagged by Thrifty Traveler. I don’t think anyone is going to like these updates…

American hides basic economy with new fare displays

Historically American’s website has been pretty straightforward with how it displays fares. If you searched for a given route, you’d see all the fare choices on one page, from basic economy to first class.

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But that’s no longer the case. Now when you search a fare in most markets, you’ll only see two columns displayed — “Main” and “Premium.”

You might assume “okay, great, that must mean that there’s no basic economy on this flight, and the cheapest fare doesn’t have major restrictions.” Well, you’d be wrong. Once you click on the downwards arrow next to “Main,” you’ll see an actual breakdown of the various economy fare options.

There are a lot of things that many of us can’t agree on in the world. However, I feel like this change being negative is something we can almost universally agree on. Does anyone think the new booking process is better? The way I view it, the issue here is twofold:

• Anyone looking to compare fares needs to do more clicking, to actually be able to compare pricing across various flights
• This is also downright deceiving, because “Main” is how American has historically described the non-basic economy fare, and now the fare shown on the initial page as being for “Main” is typically actually for basic economy

American’s basic economy fares of course come with extra restrictions. So while consumers typically want to book the lowest fare, American’s goal is always for people to “buy up” to the next higher fare, to generate extra revenue. I have to imagine that this change is part of that goal.

For what it’s worth, American is the only major US airline to display fares this way. All other major US airlines make it clear on the first booking page which fares are for basic economy, and which aren’t.

How American justifies this change

While the above was my take on these changes, what does American have to say? Here’s the carrier’s explanation for these changes:

Based on customer feedback, we’ve made strides in the last few months to simplify the booking experience on aa.com by grouping fares by cabin and then providing customers the option to click down to view details of various fare offerings in each cabin.

Our updated, more intuitive display shows first the options for Main Cabin or Premium Cabin, before then guiding the customer through each fare product within the respective cabin to provide more clarity to our customers on the type of fare they may choose to purchase, and the benefits that come with it.

This display ensures customers can comparison shop and choose the fare that makes the most sense for them based on their travel needs or benefits they may already receive through AAdvantage status.

So this is due to “customer feedback,” and is supposed to be “intuitive” and “provide more clarity.” To American’s credit, I can appreciate that the new format gives more of a side-by-side comparison of the fare types. However, previously you could click on each fare and see what was included, and there were also warnings when booking basic economy.

Maybe I’m a conspiracy theorist, but I just have a hard time imagining that this isn’t specifically intended to hide basic economy fares, and to appear to have more competitive pricing at first.

Bottom line

American Airlines has updated the way it displays fares on its website and app. Rather than listing the various types of fares (including basic economy) during the initial booking process, you now have to click through to an extra page to see the basic economy fare. Worst of all, the fare that’s initially displayed as “Main” is typically for basic economy (even though “Main” is how American has historically marketed non-basic economy).

What do you make of these changes to American’s booking process?