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There’s escalation in the Discounted First Class War.

Yesterday’s post about Y-UP and Q-UP fares brought in a few e-mails. Including this one:

Have you seen that United now goes beyond Y-UP and Q-UP and now features M-UP and B-UP fares?

It’s true. Confirmed. Whoo.

Pulling up a list of fares (on Travelocity’s fare tool) between, say, Washington and Los Angeles on the arbitrary date of October 28, I see these “discounted” premium fares:

Delta USD 983.00+ F06C booking code F
American USD 1159.00+ YUPP7ZN booking code P
United USD 1159.00+ QUA7UPN booking code A
United USD 1159.00+ QUA7UP4Z booking code A
American USD 1533.00+ YUPPMZ booking code P
United USD 1533.00+ QUAUP4Z booking code Z
United USD 1533.00+ QUAUP booking code A
American USD 1933.00+ YUPMZ booking code A
United USD 2433.00+ MUAUP booking code P
United USD 2433.00+ MUAUP4D booking code D

Notice that the Delta fare that doesn’t play these -UP games is actually the cheapest of the discounted premium fares. Go figure. (FYI, the fares with booking code D or Z are business class fares on 3-class planes… hope you’re keeping score.) And none of these fares come close to the discounted economy class prices that most people look for. -UP fares shine when you’re traveling at the last minute and all fares are sky high.

This is getting silly. We have Yuppie and Quppie fares, and now Muppies and Buppies. It’s getting too hard to keep track of all these options. My brain is going to explode.