sfjohn

If Alaska offered some flights where customers had to show vaccination records to fly, would you be more likely to purchase those fights ? If so, would you be willing to pay more?

missamo80

No.

No.

The whole point to getting vaccinated is I no longer care about other people's COVID state.

Altaflyer

I would totally choose those flights but I don’t see any rationale to charge more....that would be offensive. It would likely only work on high frequency routes. I’d also support vaccine passports which will be the norm on international flights soon.

NoLaGent

And the whole not getting sick and dying thing, which I'm also a big fan of.

But yes, if anything, it should be the opposite. A vax discount or VAXBOGO would be nice!

tom911

I'd pay a few dollars extra to fly a fully vaccinated flight, but with Alaska's thinning schedule from SFO, with New York City not having a single flight now on some days of the week, I don't see that on the agenda. With one flight a day on some days of the week to JFK and EWR, you would have to make those flights the ones for the fully vaccinated to fly, so there would not be options for those not vaccinated.

A bigger issue is how would Alaska staff a fully-vaccinated flight. In the Bay Area, we've seen large groups of employees in corrections and health care who are not vaccinated. Can't think it's any different among flight attendants and pilots. How would Alaska go about mandating all employees on board must be fully vaccinated to operate a fully-vaccinated flight? I've seen one hospital in Texas (Houston Methodist) mandate that all employees must be vaccinated by June or they will be terminated. Haven't seen any airline CEO mandate vaccines for employees (and not expecting it), so having dedicated flights for those that are fully vaccinated can't be a consideration until you somehow address having the Alaska employees on board be fully vaccinated first. Imagine that's a negotiable issue.

chrisl137

I've been flying plague infested flights all year and would continue to do so. I would like them to bring back some of the transcons that I need for work so that I'm not stuck flying status free on OAL. Work travel is starting up for me next week and everybody's schedules kind of suck still.

LWkitty

No ... just, no. The logistics of making something like that work would be a nightmare, with very little payoff.

It's a few hours on a flight, not a week in a resort or on a cruise ship.

flytoeat

I answered an AAG survey several weeks ago that asked this very question.

vanillabean

I remember a time when people didn’t have little screens to look at. A pandemic mask policy along with social distancing slows down people, and I think that’s a good thing. A form of detox if you will. If an all-vaccinated flight means leaving both masks and little screens behind, then fine. But since the latter won’t happen, I enjoy masks on planes while we have them. I wouldn’t mind paying a little extra to have fully policy-attentive staff.

mtofell

I honestly don't have an opinion or know the answer to this but am wondering - would such a thing be legal?

tom911

The CEO of United was interviewed by the Washington Post last week and his thoughts were that fully vaccinated flights, which he thought could come into play with certain countries, would be a regulatory issue, so they'd probably need some federal guidance to do something like that.

When questioned about a "vaccinated-plus" cabin (a takeoff on Mileage Plus), he had this to say:https://www.washingtonpost.com/washi...o-scott-kirby/

DuckFlyer

I would pay extra to have a flight offered with no masks required!

As it should have been from the beginning: wear a mask if you are concerned and don’t wear a mask if you are not concerned.

ashill

It wouldn't make any difference for me, since I won't be traveling until overall case counts are low enough that public health authorities consider travel safe.

It's not transmission on the airplane itself (since that appears to be quite rare), or even my own personal health, that I'm worried about anyway; instead, it's the fact that travel in any large numbers increases the probability of spreading variants and undercuts local control of the virus. In my home province, which has per capita case and death rates lower than most US states despite having fewer vaccinations administered, even non-essential intra-provincial travel is (rightly) prohibited, so I'm certainly not getting on an airplane and risking spreading the virus from one community to another until public health authorities on both ends say it's warranted. I want the pandemic to end, not to get where we are (the end being in sight within months if we keep up our guard a bit longer and achieve high vaccination rates, even just one dose), relax protections, and never really get cases down to levels where transmission can be controlled. In fact, I haven't even travelled as far as the nearest AS-served-in-normal-times airport (60 km away) in nine months, in keeping with public health guidance (which in Canada rightly does not change if you're vaccinated for now, since vaccines are just becoming available to nearly everyone in the next few weeks).

So no, an all-vaccinated plane won't change my attitude towards flying at all; it's caseload on the ground everywhere in the network that will. If significant numbers of people travel now (as they appear to be doing in the US), that will take longer.

And I very much resent the "if you're concerned don't travel and wear a mask" attitude. It's not about your safety or my safety; it's about the community's safety. Right now, I view travelling and not wearing a mask just as I view drunk driving: I don't care that you're endangering yourself, I care that you're endangering your community.

ETA: Once the vaccine is widely-enough available so that anyone who is unvaccinated is unvaccinated as a personal choice to free-ride off of the responsible members of society, then I fully support vaccine mandates in several places where they're relatively-easy to enforce, including employment and air travel, with limited exceptions for those who can't for whatever reason (no vaccine yet approved for their age group and unusual health circumstances that make vaccination unsafe being the two obvious ones). But I view that as more a public health consideration that should be up to public health authorities, not a factor that would affect whether I personally choose to fly Alaska.

SimonT007

No
No

Calculon

Yes.
No.

They will never do it, and that's ok, too.