Budget airlines like Spirit and Frontier have been a lot more successful than anyone would have imagined – apparently people are ok with giving up every possible aspect of comfort in exchange for the lowest ticket price possible. As a result of this, leading airline brands in the United States, like American Airlines and United Airlines, have also implemented a budget system by creating a new class of service called Basic Economy.
In a flying sense, it’s the same as regular Economy; the difference isn’t like how first class is separated from the rest of the plane in domestic flights. But, the process leading up to the actual flight is drastically different – you can’t bring carry-on luggage, you have to pay extra fees for everything, you board the plane last, and you get assigned your seat (instead of picking it ahead of time at booking/check-in).
I’m going to be going on a trip soon, so I’ve been looking at airline prices. Even though I’m pretty loyal to
oneworld and only fly American Airlines, I still want to do some price comparisons to see if it’s worth flying with another airline for one trip and foregoing adding to my frequent flyer balance. I think
Google Flights is a great tool to use to do that, so I browse it pretty frequently.
One thing that’s been irritating me about Google Flights lately is how they’ve integrated Basic Economy into their search results, but haven’t actually separated it from the rest of the classes of travel. They have Economy, Premium Economy, Business, and First Class, but no Basic Economy (under which I would assume Spirit Airlines and other no-amenity airlines would fall).
Because of that, I often run into situations where I search for a flight and get really excited when I see that American Airlines and United Airlines are offering Economy flights that are somehow the same price as Spirit Airlines. I eagerly click on my preferred
oneworld airline to book…
… only to find that, even though Google Flights hasn’t implemented Basic Economy vs. Economy filtering in the search field, they have, in fact, implemented it in the actual ticket purchase page. So, when I go to actually buy the ticket, there is a new drop-down menu that magically appears that now does actually have that distinction in place … and wants to charge me an extra US$28 to upgrade to Economy – the class of service I was looking for in the first place.
I’d imagine that this is likely an issue with budget airlines like Spirit and Frontier getting permanently relegated to Basic Economy status on all their flights, and they wouldn’t be too happy about that, but I feel like this is a pretty important quality-of-life feature that Google Flights should look into implementing in the search function from the beginning.
In the meantime, this price is still pretty good, and it looks like I’ll be headed to Chicago in a few weeks for just around US$100.