CalanMan

I'm also surprised by this. Way back, long before the merger, I had a pretty big schedule change happen to me on an upgraded companion-cert ticket and the agent allowed us to change routing and put us in U for the whole ride. I can't say for sure that there wasn't U space, but IIRC, there hadn't been.

@Eujeanie is your itinerary before or after 4/24? I can see this making a bit of sense (from a technical standpoint, though not from a customer service standpoint) if the VX reservation system is still around, but I'm really surprised if they couldn't open up U space for you if it was simply a pmVX A320 flying on the all-Alaska post-4/24 schedule.

Eujeanie

My flights were for June. She was very clear, and even put me on hold while she checked, that we could not be on that VX metal because there was no U space. But I'm wondering now...what if there was NO U upgradeable space on any flight that day? What would they have done then? Bump us back to Y? And I'm still perturbed that they thought it was ok to randomly put us on a flight the day before!

CalanMan

@Eujeanie, I know VX has a passionate fan club, but if you didn't fly them before 2012-ish, you really aren't missing out on all that much. When the investors started demanding cost cuts, the service turned pretty sour. They took a bunch of benefits that they had been giving to everyone away, and introduced status tiers to be able to earn them back. VX was my far-and-away favorite airline for about 3 years, from when they started flying through 2012, and I was really, really happy flying with them for about 90% of my travel. But then they took away a ton of stuff, like free changes and bags, that made them materially, not just stylistically, better. I don't care at all about purple mood lighting. Customer service attitude also fell apart. I got tired of dealing with the "cool kids" at the check in desk who were too cool to bother helping you, would become snippy when you pointed out policies that they should have known without a reminder, and after two really negative experiences declared "I'll never fly them again!" ...and unlike so many who say that about so many airlines, I actually didn't, at least until Alaska bought them.

There were a few years where VX really was a full head better than any other domestic carrier, but that moment is at least half a decade in the past now.

As far as I can tell, customer care has already started to turn around with AS management in charge. If you were happy with the AS product before (which I certainly was), and didn't rely on the AA partnership for domestic travel too much, I think you'll be happy with the merger. If they can achieve a hard product somewhere between pmAS and pmVX, and customer service at AS standards, we'll have a great airline for any trips that are covered by their route network and schedule. I just hope that as the new MAXs and 321s are delivered, that they can reverse the trend of the schedule/map shrinking.

CalanMan

Hmm, interesting. I'm sorry to hear that. I wonder if the policy has changed, or if what happened to me before was a special CS gesture.

While talking to the agent on the phone last week cleaning up my own reservations from the schedule change, she seemed very aware of "former Virgin" aircraft. In June, there is no such thing as VX metal. There will be legacy VX planes, but it'll all be AS equipment. I was under the impression that all customer-facing policies (like upgrades and reaccommodation) would be unified with the schedule unification, but maybe that is incorrect. If the call centers are highly-cognizant of whether flights are on legacy VX aircraft, then there is probably a reason that it's actually relevant to their work. I wonder if we'll have to wait until interior cabin reconfig before reservation policies are truly unified? That would be unfortunate.

MapMan25

Thanks for the heads up. My trip from EUG-LAS was via SEA, and with the earlier EGU flight, I can and will go through PDX and arrive 3 1/2 hours earlier. Plus they comped me a Premium Class upgrade, though I tend to prefer exit rows for the legroom.

Kurt

I see that SEA-BWI now leaves at 7:45 a.m. instead of 9:50 or 9:55 a.m., so I can't do DEN-SEA-BWI without an overnight. Dislike as this was an easy upgrade and a nice way to rack up some extra miles.

sfozrhfco

AS is not going to optimize their schedule for connections from DEN going East. Especially given they are dropping flights from DEN To California, DEN is clearly not even an important market for them. The number of profitable passengers making 4 hour diversions to go East is slim to none for them.

rustykettel

jinglish

I really appreciate how other FlyerTalkers make me feel sane sometimes.

formeraa

Or until they finalize the late summer/early fall schedule!

Kurt

That does kind of suck losing VX's DEN-SFO route. I never used it that much but it was a nice option. I wonder if AS will move to A39. That would be nice but I'd have to stop collecting 20-minute bag certs I guess!

ashill

Indeed. But these before-8:00 flights from SEA to the east coast make connections for the NW (YLW being the important one for me personally) difficult or impossible too, and that seems like a set of connecting markets that AS should care about. A 7:45 flight probably only blows up YLW and YYJ (because of the need to clear Customs and thus a long minimum connect time), but still annoying and puzzling that they don't make connections possible. And the earlier flights (eg the 6:59 AM to BOS) make connections from the crack of dawn flights out of EAT, GEG etc impossible, which seems silly.

ashill

And that illustrates AS's issue.

sfozrhfco

This is more of a problem relating to their limited flight options to the East. If there is only 1 or a couple flights a day, they need to optimize the flights for O/D to be competitive. If they can sell seats in the summer with the vast majority of them going to O/D passengers at a reasonably profitable fare, this should logically be the priority (at least for a bean counter looking at the short term). At the moment, they seem to really only care about making connections from the likes of YLM/YYJ to cities West of the rockies a priority. Whether or not that is a good strategy is definitely up for debate but reduction of code share options with AA/DL does definitely hurt in this regard as the AS network suddenly becomes much smaller for a large part of North America based travellers. One small tweak in times takes out a whole days worth of reasonable connections to many destinations.

PDXpress

MFR, RDM, EUG... Earliest you can get to SEA is around 7:00am.
AS has a 7:00am departure to ATL that allows for almost no connections. I don't get it either.