Why is Alaska Flying from St. Louis to Puerto Vallarta?
Why is Alaska Flying from St. Louis to Puerto Vallarta?
The airline announced 18 new routes on Wednesday. A few are head-scratchers. What's going on here?
Dear readers,
In our very insular and risk-averse world of aviation, anything out of the ordinary stands out. I was surprised yesterday when I saw Alaska's announcement of 18 new and mostly winter-seasonal routes, including New York JFK to Puerto Vallarta, Kansas City to Cancún and Puerto Vallarta, and St. Louis to Puerto Vallarta.
So surprised, in fact, that I quickly wrote up a hot take. I’ll summarize it for you: in an early draft of this newsletter, I asked (really, was skeptical about) whether Alaska, which has a weak (or maybe nonexistent?) brand in the Midwest and is typically a diligent and well-run airline that makes rational choices, really planned to challenge Southwest in two of its strongest markets, if only once per week. Yes, Southwest is down, but not so much that it wouldn’t quash one of its biggest competitors for daring to fly from two of its Midwestern focus cities.
But then, luckily, I got the real scoop from one of my readers. Even though Alaska’s announcement explains that the 18 routes will “cater to increased leisure demand to warm weather destinations during winter,” one Alaska insider tells me the Kansas City and St. Louis routes slated for winter and spring aren’t a poke at a wounded competitor dealing with an activist investor, but rather a partnership with Apple Vacations, which is buying a block of seats on every flight. Alaska will retain some seats to sell, the insider said, but that’s all gravy: the routes will work regardless.1
This leaves us with only New York-to-Puerto Vallarta as an outlier. That one is a head-scratcher because my source tells me it’s not an Apple Vacations flight. But it is low stakes: Alaska will only fly it Jan. 8 to April 20, and only four times a week. Amazingly, JetBlue — which is supposed to be all things to all people in New York — isn’t planning to fly the route this winter, though that may change for competitive reasons. Still, I think it’s an odd move for Alaska. I don’t want to be anti-competitive, but I like an airline that sticks to playing in its own sandbox, and JFK-to-Mexico isn’t a core competency for Alaska. Yes, I know airlines may have excess crew or aircraft time, and it may cost them little to fly the airplane in an off-peak period, or maybe a carrier has an unused slot in New York, but I’m still not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
I asked my subscriber about it. “It’s an experiment,” the person said. This is all part of a strategy CEO Ben Minicucci and chief commercial officer Andrew Harrison outlined in April 2023 as they announced results from a disastrous 2023 first quarter, when the airline lost $142 million, despite a pretty strong March. The airline, they said, had to find a way to get back to break-even in January and February, even if it required creative thinking. The plan, as outlined then: more ski and sun flying, and fewer transcontinental (or cold city-to-cold city) frequencies.
Alaska tried some out-of-the-box stuff last winter, including Seattle and Los Angeles to the Bahamas, but it was hard to gauge its effectiveness, as most of the talk this past winter centered on Max 9s and plug doors. Next winter will be another chance for executives to show how they’ve fixed the network — or not.
