Frontier Begins Offering "Productized" Fares

Recommended Sources

About Travel Industry

BNET Travel provides daily industry trends and news coverage with insights for managers and executives into all aspects of the travel and tourism industry. In addition to detailed airline and hotel company profiles, we bring you industry analysis on new travel and carrier routes, bankruptcies, mergers, tourism figures, investments and a host of other important business issues.

Frontier President and CEO Sean Menke’s roots are showing. Menke, who was previously with Air Canada, has brought that carrier’s fare structure down south to his current company Frontier. The airline announced yesterday that it would begin offering three levels of fares: Economy, Classic, and Classic Plus. I’ve been a big proponent of this type of “productized” faring for years, and I’m glad to see it’s slowly being adopted.

Instead of having me explain the structure, I’ll just show it directly from Frontier’s website:

My biggest problem with fees in general is that you have to pay for them individually as you go through your travel experience. This structure enables people to self-select what kind of ticket they want up front. This makes life much easier for the customer, and it gets them to consider an upsell very early on. It also has the benefit of clearly displaying what customers will get when they buy their ticket, so expectations are set appropriately up front.

Nice job, Frontier.

Tags: Structure, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Recruitment & Selection, Benefits, Internet, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Brett Snyder

In addition to writing BNET's travel industry blog, Brett Snyder also pens the award-winning consumer travel blog, Cranky Flier. You can follow him on Twitter under the name crankyflier.

BNET User Analysis

Voice your 2cents

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

1

Nicholas Barnard

12/20/08 | Report as spam

RE: Frontier Begins Offering

Brett,
How does this show up on GDS systems?
2

brett snyder

12/21/08 | Report as spam

RE: Frontier Begins Offering

That's a good question. If Frontier has done this by using booking codes, then the GDS will be able to show it. Virgin America, for example, does this with Main Cabin Select. Certain booking codes are for one fare type and another for the other fare types. Of course, the online travel agents wouldn't have any of this displayed so you'd need to go to a real travel agent or to Frontier directly.

The GDS and Airline Reservation Systems have been the big sticking points in the adoption of this type of strategy, and that's why Air Canada has opted to have ITA develop a new reservation system for them so they can handle it better internally. One of these days, the GDSs will actually catch up.