No, not really. The operator of the short, feeder flight will always be at a major $ disadvantage given how revenue is calculated. The profit in running short feeders is in “owning” the connection and in getting the onward flight ... even when there’s a JV.

And WestJet will still want to see YYJ-PHX, for example, connecting with WS over YVR rather than with DL over SEA — even though that Seattle connection is with their JV partner.

The fact that DL had those full flights feeding their own Delta hub in Seattle ... and still felt that it made financial sense to pull the route ... is very telling. If DL couldn’t justify it, there’s no chance of WS being able to justify it — when they’d just be handing their traffic over to Delta at SEA.

The economics of small feeder services like Link (and even Encore, to some extent) is to drive traffic to and through your own hubs. The odds of Link ever operating a point-to-point flight that bypasses WestJet’s hub airports are slim.