It’s not often you expect to hear the words “Frontier” and “Business Travel” in the same sentence, but the airline has made a small but useful move on that stage. In fact, what it does for business travelers is something that even leisure travelers can benefit from.
Frontier is an airline that I think most would agree is aimed at the leisure traveler. I’m not saying it exactly because of the product. After all, it has a useful elite frequent flyer program that gives useful freebies. It also has a decent built-in with plenty of extra legroom. If you’re not getting an upgrade on another airline, Frontier wouldn’t be a bad choice…if it flies when you need it.
The big problem for Frontier is its schedule. It flies a lot of routes and doesn’t fly them very often.
After all, this is an airline that, according to Cirium data, has 361 routes currently booked in June, and more than half of them fly less than every day. Less than 13 percent of routes have at least two flights a day. That’s not great for a business traveler’s schedule. Case in point… Delta has less than 5 percent of its North American and Caribbean flights operating less than daily, while only half of the airline’s routes have at least three flights daily.
That being said, Frontier does have planes that fly at specific times. And while I can’t imagine any business traveler (or someone with a modicum of sense) taking this flight, no matter how cheap it is…
… there are many flights that operate at times when normal people would board planes. And if Frontier happens to have flights when a business traveler needs to fly, it should try to get them on board.
Frontier realizes this, so it created a simpler, more business-friendly fare that corporate travelers could book with ease. This is called BizFares.
BizFares can only be booked through travel agents using Global Distribution Systems (GDS) including Amadeus, Saber and Travelport. Why on earth would Frontier promote the use of GDS when no one else does? It’s not. But he knows that many business travelers have to book through agencies that use GDSs, so he thinks he might as well put something useful and money-making into that system.
Frontier does sell tickets through the GDS today, but it only sells the base fare with no extras and sells at a slight premium compared to its own website. For example, if I hated myself and wanted to buy a ticket for this flight from LA to Dallas on May 18th, the base fare is $138.98 when booked direct. At Saber, it’s $143.98.
This is intended more for the traveler who searches solely on price through Expedia or other online travel agencies, but once purchased, requires you to go ahead and add extra directly with Frontier. If you’re traveling for work, you’ll absolutely need to buy ancillary goods, so now you’ll have to go to two places to do it, and corporate travel policies don’t always make that easy. For this reason (and others, such as reliability issues), I’ve found that most corporate agencies simply tend to ignore Frontier as a viable option and don’t even think about pricing if it appears on the GDS.
Knowing this, Frontier decided it could also create a bundled fare that it could sell at the GDS for the corporate traveler, who would then not have to worry about ancillary services. BizFares comes with many things:
This was constructed well. It doesn’t include checked baggage because business travelers don’t often need it. (If they do, they can add it after the fact, but it probably won’t be priced well enough to do it that way.) Includes extra legroom (which is apparently no longer called Stretch, but rather “Premium “) and comes with early upload. There are no change fees and it allows for free same-day or standby confirmation. You also earn extra miles.
The closest I can get to this on Frontier’s own website is to buy the base price of $138.98, add what is now generically called “Package 1” with standard seats for $110 — what happened to The Works and The Perks? so boring now… — and then pay the $9 surcharge to get extra legroom. All-in, I’m looking at $257.98.
When I turned to GDS and looked at BizFares, it’s a better deal. The way Frontier does this is it reserves two fare classes for BizFares, C and J. These are the classes normally reserved for business class on other airlines, so…why not?
Tariff C is low and Tariff J is high. In this case, fare C is only $223.96, saving over $30 over direct booking AND includes the ability to make free changes on the day of travel, something package 1 doesn’t include. While this may not be useful in the majority of Frontier markets, there are some where it can be useful. But it’s still $30 cheaper, so it’s a good way to get around.
If the C tariff is not available, well, the J tariff will rarely make sense. That’s $433.96 in this market. There aren’t many cases where this will be worth buying, but perhaps if only the full bus fare is otherwise available, this might work. This seems more like a fishing expedition, where if you catch one fish, it’s worth dropping the line in the water.
However, Frontier is really trying to keep people on their toes with this product by defining it in a weird way. It doesn’t really seem to follow any real pattern. I went and downloaded different markets on different dates and the results were all over the map:
Frontier BizFares Comparison
For some reason the Philly – Vegas market had no J price, only C. And Phoenix – Vegas was a last minute search so C was not available.
In most markets, the BizFare option was cheaper than the bundle directly with Frontier. Dallas/Fort Worth – San Juan was an exception, as was Trenton – Orlando. In other markets, the difference was minimal. From Phoenix to Cincinnati, for example, BizFare was $3.02 cheaper. Elsewhere, the difference was huge, like Cleveland to Punta Cana, where BizFare saved $81.
I should note that I was also looking at building this directly with Frontier without a bundle and putting everything together instead, and it was much more expensive that way all around. The only time it makes sense is if someone doesn’t need a carry-on or doesn’t care about pre-assigning a seat. But even then a comparison is necessary.
Ultimately, I think what Frontier is doing here is wise. It knows there are business travelers who would fly the airline if it were easy enough. So, Frontier separated out two fare classes and simply made them include all the things a business traveler would need…and a little more.
The “more” part is probably key here because it allows Frontier to discuss what a deal it is to buy this without having to admit that you might not need everything in the bundle.
It’s still not seamless. Once this is booked, the passenger must go to the Frontier website to select a seat. But without requiring payment, it removes a huge amount of the friction that prevents commuters from doing this today. It was quick and easy to implement something like this, and apparently the airline just wanted something quick to market. After all, he had quite a revenue problem and he needs to overcome it.
I waited a little while after the initial rollout to see if there were promotional rates on the market that would come out, but I still don’t understand the pricing at all. It could be that the airline is just trying a lot of things and seeing what sticks. Undoubtedly fares will change and I would still recommend always comparing direct booking and BizFare booking, but this is a welcome addition to the market and should at least bring some dividends to Frontier.
And Frontier isn’t done. It also announced it will block the middle seats in the first two rows, creating a European-style business class for those who want the room. It costs nothing to create this product, just the potential to lose 4 spots of revenue. But if Frontier can attract more business travelers, it will easily pay off.
Now Frontier just needs to get its work in better shape. Once you do that, it becomes a really viable option.
