Articles tagged “alaska airlines”

Slowly, Virgin America is disappearing. That's bad news for its loyal customers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other parts of the country. But it's necessary. Virgin America was too small as a stand-alone carrier to compete with the nation's four largest carriers.

Many have dreamt of finding easy fortune in California. But Alaska Airlines is discovering -- via its merger with Virgin America -- that the airport tarmacs aren't paved with gold.

We know it takes a long time to retrofit airplanes. And we know airlines hate to remove planes from service. But we wish Alaska could work faster to add speedy Wi-Fi. Three years is a long time to wait.

Alaska has been so well run that we expect its early transition hiccups to be ironed out before they cause United/Continental-level disasters.

In recent years, many Alaska Airlines frequent flyers liked to fly American, because they would receive loyalty benefits even when flying the competition. But starting next year, that perk will end, and that's not great news for road warriors.

The move for Virgin's most loyal customers will be a hard one. But in return they get an airline that will take them so many more places.

Are old-school U.S. airlines too focused on short-term profits and competing against low-cost carriers to deliver a quality product to their loyal passengers?

Alaska's Mileage Plan program continues to get stronger with a new series of incentives aimed at west coast Virgin America customers. Between the incentives and the numerous partners, Alaska has put together a pretty solid loyalty program.

Alaska took one step closer to the Oneworld alliance by kicking off a partnership with Finnair this week. It already has a strong relationship with American, another Oneworld partner, as relations with Delta continue to cool.

This makes perfect sense, and can't cost Alaska Airlines much in revenue. Why don't other U.S. carriers do the same thing?