RustyC

Re: OP. Well, I think the natural order of things would be for AS to be kind of a lukewarm partner with a number of airlines similar to HA, in that it has a little fiefdom (Alaska) with some minor monopoly routes a bit like the Hawaii interislands (albeit more expensive), so partners get to sell expensive tickets to Nome and AS gets codeshare access to most of the continent.

OTOH, AS has gotten SEA/PDX centric with the Alaska monopoly routes as secondary, and DL is basically trying to muscle into the SEA hub. So that's forcing the issue, though it's unclear how many routes DL plans to add that would go head-to-head with AS routes. DL is likely stepping on future AS growth plans if adding more routes to SEA from the east and midwest.

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With inspiration from this thread, I did hurry up and book my September Alaska award trip (Last year's was a bit different: JNU with a stopover in PDX). This year it's a two-fer with both ANC (2 days) and FAI (3 days) at 25K total with all-DL via MSP on both the long outbound and return (i.e. some chance at an upgrade). ANC-FAI is AS, of course. Big foliage time as well.