Originally Posted by
acl65pilot
I know that they have looked at Alaska over the last few years, there has been talk about it, but now that we are really getting the milk for free is there a reason to buy them?
I hope so. My fear is that WN will make a very strong offer for Alaska here in the near future knowing what the poison pill entails. Reason being that if we lost that lift via code share it would once again make a huge hole in our route network that we could not fill. That scares me. It is what scares me from a corporate perspective. We put our faith in a business deal with another public company that could be bought, and as a result undermine our business plan.
I guess we may need to get burned by this for the company to learn. Poison pills only go so far.
Don't you think we could beat WN in a bidding war if we needed too? I think between us and AF/KLM, we can come up with enough coin to win that battle. If we bought AK and took advantage of the overlapping costs and economies of scale with the 737 fleet, maybe we could actually beat WN at their own game on the west coast. We're gonna need something other than a codeshare for LAX and SEA. Their flight ops costs are obviously much higher than ours and I've actually heard that our CASM on the narrowbody fleet is lower than theirs, but that was just hearsay so I'm not sure.