American, Delta and United are all up-front during the flight search process about what type of seat you're getting. Either you are booking regular economy (aw

American, Delta and United are all up-front during the flight search process about what type of seat you're getting. Either you are booking regular economy (awful), or extra-legroom economy ("Main Cabin Extra" on AA, "Comfort+" on DL, "Economy Plus" on UA), or first/business class. Delta is also up-front about when you're booking its "Basic Economy" fare type, which has extra fees for basically everything other than walking through the door of the plane. AA, when it rolls out its version, will almost certainly do the same. And once again the reason why those "basic" fares are coming into existence is the tried and tested knowledge of the airlines on what matters to most of the people buying airline tickets: price, only price and nothing but price. They're not dumb; in fact, some very smart people are doing the behind-the-scenes work of deciding what fare classes to sell, how many seats in each fare class to sell, etc., and they have access to mountains of data on customer behavior to guide them. For a more HN-friendly analogy, treat having a disaggregated ultra-basic fare among the five cheapest for the route as being in the top five results on Google for a search term. It simply does not matter what else anyone does: the low fare and the high Google search-result position are going to overwhelmingly win.