IStream

In September, AS ditched the 6:40pm 737 from OAK to SEA, replacing it with a Sky West CRJ700. Why they chose to do this on always-full flight that's perfectly timed for business travelers instead of one earlier in the day is not readily apparent but one assumes they needed a 737 on a more lucrative route.

Now, as of March 14, 2016, it looks like AS is ditching the 10:15am flight from SEA to OAK entirely. If you want to go direct from SEA to OAK any time before 2pm, it's 6:10am or nothing. I'm sorry, but this makes no sense in any logical universe.

I hate to leave AS after 10 years as a 75K but as a weekly commuter on this route, AS has left me no choice but to switch my business to Southwest.

amartin1979

Wow. Yet another "legacy" carrier pulls out of OAK.

bofc

I take the OAK/SEA flights regularly and they are almost always full. And with so much SEA/SFO competition (four airlines) the fares are actually higher on the OAK/SFO route. I believe Alaska is thinking that they can use the equipment elsewhere (on questionable new routes with one flight a day service) and still keep current passengers who (they think) will use SFO instead. But that's not going to work - just another example of poor management helping Southwest since WN operates 737s from OAK to PDX or SEA. It's a shame - many loyal OAK AS passengers will soon become loyal WN passengers.

haddon90

full flights do not mean a flight is profitable. i love OAK. great, convenient airport. but if everyone is pulling out of OAK, probably means there isn't much $ there.

ucdtim17

Southwest manages to do ok, flying 7x 737s to SEA and 6 to PDX. Perhaps at some point Alaska will overextend with the national expansion and reallocate planes to improve service and be more competitive in what should be home territory on the west coast.

SFO in recent history had the BART advantage over OAK but now that's not an issue now with the BART connector. Hopefully the slide in service won't continue.

IStream

I would argue that this move is strong evidence of their overextension.

Snowdevil

Or, on the other side, that they're allocating assets where they'll generate higher yields. There are 19 new B737-900ERs being delivered in 2016 alone, so this probably isn't a matter of being overextended but being selective on where your capacity goes.

PDXPremier

I've gone through OAK, SJC, and SFO in the past few years with AS and I can honestly say OAK is my least favorite due to ZERO upgrade chances on the all Q400 flights from PDX....no lounge access (compared to SJC and SFO which both have lounge access for Priority Pass folks).

OAK has a bit of a dumpy feel to it in all honestly compared to the clean, roomy terminals at SJC and SFO.

beckoa

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.694 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

...not to mention zero lounges.

Eastbay1K

I'll take the trade off of being able to park and walk to the terminal, very short lines, UBER being a reasonable fare if need be ...

This is very bad news.

PDXPremier

And when you land in OAK, you're in Oakland....kinda the same feeling I got when I landed (and immediately re-boarded) in DTW

channa

Please. Business decisions are much more complicated than that.

Fares are up, if OAK isn't profitable, it would have been really not profitable years ago, and they would have pulled out then.

The reality is they have a finite number of aircraft. They have a major competitor trying to kill them in SEA. There is also a booming economy in SEA that they need to serve. They have to make decisions that sacrifice routes elsewhere in order to gain aircraft in SEA to fortify their main hub.

They also realize that their livelihood is threatened by DL's expansion in SEA, and they need to diversify (which is why you see some more oddball point-to-point routes starting up).

So in that context, what they're doing may make sense. And if they had access to more aircraft, they may not even be cutting that.

PV_Premier

as long as the late night SEA-OAK (and SEA-RNO) departures stay, i'm good. those flights are better timed to connect from the late east coast arrivals banks than the last SEA-SMF flight.

ucdtim17

Dumb Oakland dig aside, Southwest is likely happy to keep scooping up demand left on the table. They're upguaging the always full 7:30 OAK-PDX flight from 300 to 800 next month. So they'll have 175 seats with TV and wifi on a big new plane while Alaska continues to putter along with the Q400. Disappointing.

And for the travelers Alaska convinces to use SFO, there's also the possibility/likelihood of massive delays if this El Nino winter really pans out and we get big storms and 30-40+ inches of rain. SFO has built record traffic in 4 years of drought and calm winters.

eponymous_coward

We wouldn't have anywhere near as much action on FT if so many people didn't think they were better at running airlines than airline CEOs, based on a criterion of "Your decision makes life tougher for me, so QED you must be making the wrong decision".