I never flew VX but I loved them. They fought against the race to the bottom on the coach in-flight experience, and they saved me money. A lot of money.
Once upon a time when you wanted to watch for low fares that major carriers would match, you subscribed to Southwest’s emails. For at least the past five years when you want to catch low fares on Southwest, you subscribe to emails from Virgin America and JetBlue. Those emails are your only notice of Southwest’s best fares: Fare matches are never publicized by the matching airline.
Just this week Southwest had to reduce its fares to match a Virgin America sale. I refared a Southwest ticket and pocketed the savings. The same thing happens maybe 20 times per year.
Southwest will save many millions in fare matching with VX gone. Some of that money will come out of my pocket. Southwest is popping the champagne.
I still remember the time I bought an SFO-LAX round trip on Southwest for $29 plus tax each way with only one day's notice, earning more than $29 worth of Rapid Rewards credit. That was a VX fare match, unannounced by Southwest as always.
My wallet and I will miss VX when they're gone.
You don't fly a lot of AS routes, do you?
I fly SEA-LAS a lot. AS and WN fare match. What was really fun was when NK just entered the market and you could get sub-50 one ways on both AS and WN. I snagged some of those because sub-100 Vegas round trip on a nonstop where the airline isn't NK doesn't happen every day.
Also the fares on SEA-SNA are pretty good, $69 one way. AS and WN are matching there, OAK-SEA and SAN-SEA too.
You know who doesn't fare match on a one stop SEA-SFO/LAX-LAS? VX...
I would say based on my experience in markets that AS and WN fly in that AS is perfectly willing to aggressively price match WN and competitors (the difference being that unlike VX they weren't a startup airline when WN entered their oribit). So I wouldn't lose hope. Right now AS and WN will be duking it out over California and the West Coast. I would expect some aggressive pricing wars between them, especially how that the merged AS actually could have something like a decent intra-CA route network, based on what they fly now:
SFO-LAX
SFO-SAN
SFO-PSP
SJC-SNA
SJC-SAN
STS-LAX
MRY-LAX
SNA-STS
LAX-MMH
FAT-SAN
Pretty light on OAK, but that's understandable...