US Airways Changes its Booking Classes to Line Up With American

American Airlines posted a travel agent advisory about how it has updated fare class for US Airways.

For tickets issued starting today for travel beginning on September 17, US Airways has worked to align its fare classes with American.

US Airways is shrinking its economy fare buckets from 15 down to 12. T, U and R will no longer be US Airways economy fares.

us airways fare classes

T, U, and R are ‘special classes’ on American. T is a coach award, U is a business class award, and — while I haven’t had occasion to search this recently — R has been a booking class for upgrades to business class on domestic 3-class flights and on two-cabin transborder flights.

It strikes me as a little strange to see the US Airways ‘R’ bucket transition to ‘E’ because that is a special class with American as well. E is used for employee travel, and for same-day confirmed changes. Perhaps American will be using that bucket in a different way going forward.

Tickets issued before today, regardless of travel date, use the same buckets they were issued into. The mapping of fare classes matters for changing such tickets and determining whether there’s inventory in the original booking class.

A minor step in many ways, but merger progress continues.


About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Yesterday was frustrating as US pulled a lot of fares in preparation for this. As an example LAX-STT showed only 4 fares (as opposed to 35 the day earlier!) We’ll see what SABRE shows today….

  2. You know, there’s not many comments here, but I think this is one of the most important articles to AA elites out there. And “Z” is the first class award ticket.

    Thanks!

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