Alaska Airlines dumps Dallas-Washington, DC/New York City routes
23 APRIL 2018 BY
SETH MILLER
In late 2014 Virgin America
toyed with a mid-continent hub. The carrier acquired gates at Love Field in Dallas and slots at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA) and Washington, DC’s Reagan National (DCA). The carrier planted its flag and began operations, focusing on major markets where it could compete against
Southwest Airlines‘ massive hub operation. When the
Alaska Airlines merger closed the routes shifted from A320 aircraft to the smaller Embraer E175s that were now available. And now, as the merger progresses, the routes are dying. In its earnings call today Alaska Airlines indicated that it agreed to lease the slots to Southwest Airlines.
As Alaska Airlines refocuses its energy on the “Most West Coast” marketing plan the one-off routes to these east coast airports show themselves to be vanity-driven more than core to the operation. In the 2014 slot allocation process, a result of the
American Airlines/US Airways merger, Virgin America President and CEO David Cush called out the “mega-airlines” that it was now facing competition from. As a new entrant and smaller carrier it received access to a handful of the highly coveted slots at each airport. It also pushed hard against Southwest Airlines and Delta to gain access at Love Field. It is worth noting that one of the
DOJ stipulations around approving the Alaska/Virgin merger requires that the combined carrier “shall not directly or indirectly sell, trade, lease, or sub-lease any of the US/AA Divestiture Assets without the prior written consent of the United States.” That approval was already granted. That is it now ceding these slots to Southwest is somewhat ironic in this context.
With these changes the LaGuardia stations will be closing; that is the only route the carrier operates from LGA; the carrier still operates one daily flight to San Francisco from DCA. At LaGuardia the move leaves
JetBlue as the sole operator in the Marine Air Terminal.