Booking classes

Under the term of booking classes you will most probably imagine the three basic travel classes-economy, business and first class. But if you have a look at your air ticket you will find your class marked by one code letter. Exactly told this is not the travel class, but it is called the booking class. Now let's have a look, which classes we have.

Economy class is the most common one and has most codes as well. It's divided into three general groups. The cheapest fares, or so called Economy restricted are marked by following letters: G, K, L, O, Q, S, T, U, V, W, X. This fare will not usually allow you any changes of your flight, or a refund and you will also get less frequent flyer programme miles. Sometimes W and X are used for bonus tickets. M, H, N are called standard fares. These will allow you more flexibility, but may be limited as well. And finally the most expensive, full fare tickets in economy are marked Y, B.

In business class you may encounter five codes in total: C, J, D, I, Z. Here C and J marks the full fare business class and D, I and Z stands for some kind of discounted or limited business class. In that case you can expect, that your tickets will be non-refundable and unchangeable. It's the same as in economy.

First class is usually marked by letter F, but some airlines also use letter P. This P stands for Premium and is used to make difference between first class in two-class plane and the first class in three-class plane, which is then marked by P and should offer you even more comfort. As well as in business and in economy, first class has also a discounted fare. It's marked A.

And the last letter you may encounter on your air ticket is R. This was used for Supersonic, so if you flew on Concorde your booking class was R. But even though Concorde doesn't fly anymore, you may see this booking class. It was re-introduced with the arrival of A380 and stands for suite class, the most luxurious one.

So now you know, what does that magic letter on your air ticket mean. If you wish to know more about your travel class you will have to have a look at your airline website, because there are great differences between airlines.