Originally Posted by
WebTraveler
Maybe this benefits existing Alaska customers by allowing Alaska to remain an independent airline and keeps economies of scale efficiencies. But overall, to those existing customers in PDX and maybe even in Seattle, I cannot see this offers us anything other than we can take an Alaska flight into Dallas Love Field and have a few more connection possibilities into JFK. Loser overall for us. Now in the end the lack of a competitor may end up increasing prices for us all.
VX has often not priced their flights competitively when considering connection vs. nonstop. Look at PDX/SEA-LAS for an example. They seem to generally want to have their feed consisting of SFO-originating traffic instead of competing for (generally lower priced) connecting traffic... like it or not that seems to be their strategy.
I tend to think AS might keep that strategy. SFO and LAX are not an ideal connecting point for SEA/PDX unless you're talking Mexico.