I don’t think this will surprise anyone, but United Airlines executives have essentially confirmed plans to introduce a “basic” Polaris business class experience…
United wants to segment business class revenue more
Yesterday, United announced its Q2 2025 financial results, and there were some interesting comments during the earnings call. Dawn Gilbertson from The Wall Street Journal asked about the concept of United introducing a “bare bones” Polaris business class experience:
“I’m wondering, you guys talked a lot recently about making Polaris even more premium. Are you weighing, like your new favorite brand loyal competitor, are you also weighing bare bones business class tickets? And if so, can you walk us through that and talk about any timeline? If not, why not?”
Here’s how United Chief Customer Officer Andrew Nocella responded:
“Look, what I would say is over time, over the last seven or eight years, we’ve leaned heavily into segmentation of our revenues, which is really an articulate way of saying, providing more and more choices to our customers so they can pick the experience they would like, from premium to basic economy. And we have learned through that time period that our customers really appreciate this.”
“Not everybody wants the full experience. Some people want other experiences. And so the value to United as an airline and to that of our customers has been proven by the segmentation of revenues that we’ve done. And we look forward to continuing to diversify our revenue base and segment it in the appropriate way, and I’ll leave it at that.”
I think it’s safe to say that these basic business class fares will become common at all of the “big three” US carriers sooner rather than later. Delta executives have openly admitted to working on introducing these, and I’m sure we’ll see American executives confirm something similar in the near future.
Will customers benefit from basic business class fares?
Over time, we’ve seen the concept of basic economy become pretty widespread, whereby the cheapest economy fares include the fewest perks. The purpose of this is twofold — to expand a carrier’s potential customer base, and to get existing customers to “buy up” to a higher fare, in order to avoid punitive restrictions.
I’d expect the concept of basic business class to be similar. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of restrictions we’ll see, but they could include less flexibility, lounge access restrictions, reduced mileage earning, fees for seat assignments, etc.
These basic fares are always framed as being good for customers, and giving them more choice, and allowing them to only pay for the services that they want. But make no mistake, that’s not actually how the implementation of these fares typically works.
I wouldn’t expect basic business class fares to be materially cheaper than existing business class fares. Instead, I suspect that more often than not, the current cheapest fares will be made the basic fares, in an effort to get people to buy up to more expensive fares. I wouldn’t consider that to be good for consumers.
At the same time, I’m not surprised to see the trend. Premium leisure demand is strong, while business travel hasn’t fully recovered. Leisure travelers are often willing to pay a lot for business class, but they’re typically not willing to pay $10K+, as some corporate customers previously may have. So it’s not surprising to see airlines using whatever strategies they can to get people to part with more of their money when flying business class.
The thing to keep in mind is that adding basic business class fares in long haul markets requires a bit more coordination, given the joint ventures that the major airlines belong to, which create metal neutrality.
Bottom line
United executive are hinting at how the airline plans to introduce basic Polaris business class at some point, in order to further segment the market. Delta executives have previously confirmed the same, so I don’t think this is much of a surprise.
I suspect that within the next year, we’ll see this be standard at all of the “big three” US carriers. It remains to be seen how punitive the restrictions get…
What do you make of United introducing a basic Polaris business class product?
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