As a West Coaster, I sort of prefer the domestic F + free EUA/UDU vs. the BF which would require copay + miles or SWU or some sort of instrument. The flight is not terribly long for many of us, and I'm not exactly burning 80K for F/J for a short hop like that if I'm on a reward.

My gut is that BF to Hawaii will be gone after the merger. CO is presently running all the Hawaii flights it can with a domestic F product. They don't have a domestic F configured widebody (a la UA or DL), so they don't really have anything capable of flying the IAH/EWR-HNL runs that doesn't have BF already in it.

Given CO's historical tendency towards operational items, that leads me to believe they didn't want a domestic F bird just for these two routes (and maybe IAH-EWR). Other than that, CO doesn't fly widebodies domestically. UA, OTOH, has a lot of domestic-configured widebodies, as they're used throughout the system for both Hawaii and various hub-to-hub flights.

Of course if CO has numbers showing a significant revenue premium due to the BF product, then it may stay. Who knows.