The economy short-haul fare has been stripped down to a base price plus a menu of paid extras, and full-service carriers are increasingly following the low-cost playbook right down to a no-frills fare of their own. That convergence raises a pointed commercial question: once every airline’s on-paper proposition looks nearly identical, how much is the brand itself still worth, and which carriers can actually charge for it? EPIC surveyed 300 UK adults who had flown short-haul to Europe in the past year, putting brand, ticket features and price into a realistic choice-based booking exercise across ten airlines and seven fare attributes to find out.

Choice modeling shows what happens when BA acts on that equity. A stripped, fully unbundled BA fare at £100 captures 17.6% of the simulated market, about three-quarters of it from rivals and almost none from new flyers, lifting BA’s modeled revenue by roughly £478 million, or 24%, while its yield per passenger falls by about a third and total market revenue actually falls by around 5%. The brand converts to share, but the win is redistributive, not additive. And the ceiling cuts the other way too: tracing the price-elasticity curve on BA’s existing fares shows demand elastic at every tested increase, so even a £5 rise loses share faster than it recovers in yield. Recognition, in other words, is not the same thing as room to raise the price.