As part of the merger between Continental and United Airlines there has been significant speculation about nearly everything. One of the more passionate discussions amongst frequent fliers is the ability to see a full listing of all the available inventory buckets on each flight. This is a feature that United has offered for some time now if the user is logged in and sets their account to "expert mode" in the settings. Continental has historically not offered this feature. Given that continental.com is to be the surviving technology platform for the new company there was much hand wringing over the future of this feature.
Looking at some very recent changes to the limited preview version of continental.com it now appears that expert mode will survive.
This display includes revenue, upgrade and award fare buckets which is a great boon to folks stalking decent prices or award seats on their favorite route. This feature is currently available only in the preview site which is access-limited. There is no confirmed date of when this will be deployed to the main site for public consumption.
Also available on the preview site is a listing of Regional and Systemwide upgrades, though it is not clear yet if the SWUs and Regionals are populated yet (I have zero either way due to choosing to accrue them in the United program).
It is great to see the company choosing to not just go with the least common denominator at every turn.
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Awesome, awesome, awesome (phew!)
these fare/upgrade codes always boggle my mind. im a total amateur. how do u guys keep this stuff straight? id pay for a good tutorial on how to decipher each carrier’s fare buckets.
where can I find “setting” after login to change to expert mode? Thanks!
You don’t have to change anything, Steven. It just works on co.com in the preview site. I’m sure it’ll be out in the public site soon.
Mike: That sounds like a great little project for me to work on during my upcoming LAX-BKK flight. I will have plenty of time; that’s for sure.
@Mike, for starters, check out this:
http://blog.wandr.me/frequentlyflying/2011/05/04/airfare-pricing-buckets-airline-fare-basis-codes-revealed/
Great tool.
It would be handy if you tweaked the script to change the cursor to a hand over the anchor tags you insert (the ones with the href of research(this) – I didn’t realize I could click on them until I looked at the script itself!