Articles tagged “virgin america”

It can take some airlines as long as a decade after a merger before they truly operate as one entity. But Alaska Airlines is working much faster to gobble up Virgin America. Part of that is because both carriers were relatively small. But by any standard, Alaska is moving quickly.

Alaska Airlines is turning to basic economy fares to help drive additional revenue. But, hey, at least flyers will be assigned a seat when they book one of these fares, easing some of the stress that usually comes with taking the risk of flying for cheap.

The information presented Sunday on 60 Minutes might be new to most travelers, but not to airline industry insiders. The question now: Is Allegiant getting better? We think the answer is yes.

After acquiring Virgin America, Alaska Airlines will switch to a single reservations system next week. The company is confident it will avoid some of the problems other airlines have faced after cutovers. We tend to agree. Let's hope it's a non-event.

Slowly, Virgin America is disappearing. That's bad news for its loyal customers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other parts of the country. But it's necessary. Virgin America was too small as a stand-alone carrier to compete with the nation's four largest carriers.

We know it takes a long time to retrofit airplanes. And we know airlines hate to remove planes from service. But we wish Alaska could work faster to add speedy Wi-Fi. Three years is a long time to wait.

Alaska has been so well run that we expect its early transition hiccups to be ironed out before they cause United/Continental-level disasters.

The move for Virgin's most loyal customers will be a hard one. But in return they get an airline that will take them so many more places.

Are old-school U.S. airlines too focused on short-term profits and competing against low-cost carriers to deliver a quality product to their loyal passengers?