Originally Posted by
AS Flyer
Alaska is a more diversified company now than they ever have been before - they have slowly grown a successful company that didn't rely on gimmicks and rock bottom price leader fares to get people in seats. I get the idea that bugs you. Sorry - Virgin is gone. AS didn't kill them - their BOD did.
AS seems to get the same hate as WN gets: they offer a somewhat different product than the US3, and for that (and in effect giving the coup de grace to VX, which everyone loved while ignoring that they completely blew their initial projections for how big they'd get and when they'd make a profit) people trash them for not being a US3 (or VX). All the while AS keeps churning out profits just like WN does, and avoids bankruptcy, or being taken over in a merger when it was obvious the business model wasn't going to go forward fast enough, something the US 3 and VX couldn't do.
Are they doomed because they basically have kissed off the high-spend transcon F market and they're just going to concentrate on inching up their market share in CA (something that VX was basically resigning themselves to doing, along with dealing with the fallout of really weird route dartboard decisions like gate capped/slot capped DAL/DCA/LGA markets or YYZ)? I dunno. It seems to be an important market for California... but you're dealing with US3 companies that have corporate contracts and B6/AA/DL/UA all with a market in NYC that probably can support premium demand from BOTH sides of the country. VX never had that; their route development out of JFK was always a couple of random one-offs like FLL, PSP or LAS. I guess we'll find out. The merger operationally hasn't been a UA/CO-style disaster for sure, so at least they got that right.
But I love how the ex-VX peanut gallery likes to trash AS but seems pretty silent about things like YYZ or DAL-AUS. VX management wasn't exactly full of route development geniuses before they waved their white flag and cashed out. They abandoned markets all the time. They had to abandon PDX, for goodness sake.