First SPG is slated to be going away and now VX.. Danm!! My travels for work and pleasure are sure going to suck even more as these two entities go "bye-bye"!

I feel your pain. Just used up 120,000 Starpoints on a nice Luxury Collection/St. Regis vacation in Mexico City. Already up to 60 nights so far this year with Starwood. Now I have until the end of the year to burn up my Virgin points. Plus trying out Hyatt with their promo and the status match. Enjoying things while they last. Don't have to bother charging things to the VX comenity card to get to help get Elevate Gold again this year now as Alaska is just marginally more attractive than a legacy carrier, so lots of changes. We will see what happens. Got my jetBlue Mint tickets this weekend for Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas...so that is one thing that won't change...for now.

I doubt it. This will likely be the easiest airline merger in a while to get through any oversight. The Justice department can only object in the event that they can prove a major impact to consumers. Basically if this would give the airline a monopoly over a route or airport, or just produce a massive company with no competition.

Even merged they are only the 5th largest domestic airline. Alaska airlines does not have much of a presence at either LAX or SFO which are Virgin Americas hubs. If anything this merger may be viewed as helping competition since they might be able to better compete against the big airlines.

Is there anything I can do with elevate points besides purchase flights? I know some other airlines let you use points for other things (cruise, hotel, electronics, cash, etc). Can I do that with Virgin?

VX has good airline partners you can redeem with but not much else.

The only other option seems to be Virgin Limited Edition.
https://www.virginamerica.com/cms/el...edition-redeem

Redemption options would improve (drastically) with AS.

Is that you Rainman? They don't even use that plane anymore

I would hope not. Not many planes that catastrophically crash are brought back into service.

It is true, AS hasn't flown the MD-80 since 2008.

I do hope the culture around maintenance has been corrected since the crash though.

Clearly it has not, which explains the frequent crashing of planes since that accident!

Wasn't the MD-80's fault, it was Alaska's cost-saving maintenance procedures. Mechanical faults can still happen with them, even with their 737's.

Wait. What? There have been fatal AS plane crashes since AS261?

Forgive me for posting on this emotional subject. I flew Virgin America yesterday for the first time. My experience with them instilled much anger into me, although the flight attendants were gracious.

I paid for a First Class flight but received notification that I would be moved down to Main Cabin Select for reasons they said they were not allowed to state but with a refund of the fare difference (which in reality was $0 - in other words, it was bait and switch), although they placed money in my newly established "bank". After an exchange of emails asking for specific explanation for why my First Class booking was not being honored, and to which they refused to explain, I cancelled the booking I originally had (I refuse to pay for First Class and only receive Main Cabin Select) and used the "bank" money to rebook in Main Cabin Select. As it turned out, yesterday on my flight 3 people were upgraded (at a cost of $99 according to the flight attendant) into First Class, including the gentleman sitting in my row who was upgraded immediately before the door was closed. All I can say is I'm glad this company is being bought out. I'm very angry regarding how they treated me (I showed the flight attendants all the e-mails between me and the company and they were at a loss for why my First Class booking was downgraded to Main Cabin Select).

I understand my situation is (hopefully) unique but any company that treats a new first-class paying customer in this way deserves to disappear. Alaska has never treated me so poorly as Virgin America. (Not even United has treated me this way).

I was on that aircraft earlier the same day. I think of it frequently. After about a year, I started flying AS again. Not on MD80s, but on the airline.

It sounds like (but who really knows, and no one can tell you) that a FAM was assigned to fly in your seat on your flight and then ended up not taking the flight. Not that they handled it well, but that's what it sounds like.