Virgin America has started flying to Hawaii from Los Angeles. (Image: Virgin America)
In domestic route news, Virgin America kicks off a new Hawaii service, JetBlue will jump into a busy Northeast Corridor market, California’s Surf Air has a new pricing option, Delta adds a route from Washington D.C., and Sun Country Airlines comes to Denver.
Virgin America Airlines continued its expansion in the Hawaii market by launching new daily non-stops this week from Los Angeles International to Honolulu. It will add more new Hawaii service next month, with plans to start flying from LAX to Kahului Airport on Maui as of June 14. The carrier already flies from San Francisco to both destinations in Hawaii. To promote the new Los Angeles routes, Virgin has launched a Hawaiiscape sweepstakes for Elevate members, offering free flights, hotel stays and 50,000 Elevate points. Members who enter at www.MakeYourHawaiiscape.com by May 27 will get 250 Elevate points.
JetBlue is planning to start flying this fall between New York LaGuardia and Boston Logan, a market thoroughly dominated by Delta and American. The carrier set an October 31 start for the service, which will offer six flights a day on weekdays between LGA and BOS, with lighter schedules on weekends. That will give JetBlue customers the option of flying to Boston from any of New York’s three airports. JetBlue said it will also take advantage of the FAA’s decision to open up slot controls at Newark Airport by adding more frequencies this fall from Newark to Orlando, Tampa, Ft. Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Ft. Myers. Meanwhile, JetBlue this week added Nashville to its route map, launching two daily roundtrips from there to Boston and one to Ft. Lauderdale.
Surf Air offers private aircraft flights around California. (Image: Surf Air)
Surf Air, which promotes itself to California travelers as an “all-you-can-fly private air travel club,” is offering a new lower-priced membership option through the end of this month with no initiation fee. The new Explorer Membership is priced at $850 per month, with a minimum three-month commitment. It includes one monthly roundtrip flight to any Surf Air destination. A regular membership starts at $1,950 a month. The company operates executive private aircraft around an intrastate network that includes airports in the Bay Area, metro Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Truckee/Tahoe, Napa, Monterey, Sacramento, Palm Springs and Las Vegas.
Delta Air Lines plans an August 1 start for new Delta Connection service between Washington Reagan National and Raleigh, according to Airlineroute.net. The carrier will offer four flights a day on the route, using CRJ900s operated by GoJet Airlines.
Sun Country Airlines, a niche carrier based at Minneapolis/St. Paul International, this week kicked off new service between Denver and MSP. The carrier operates one daily roundtrip in the market, offering Denver-originating passengers eastbound connections to Boston, Washington D.C. and New York JFK.
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Yeah, with amount of consolidation in the travel industry, I find Chris’s blog to be especially helpful, even though I’m not much of traveler these days.
I can relate though to Jeff’s frustration. It’s just that Delta really hasn’t been able to do much route wise even as they do a great job getting high net worth customers.
Haha and thanks, Tom. It is tough living in a New York-centric world! And Jeff, he’s right. When I was in ATL my work leaned naturally toward Delta and ATL, but now that I’m in SF, I’m leaning more toward SFO and LAX and UA, VX…etc but still trying to round coverage out nationally but not forgetting my ATL roots! –chris
Cheer up Jeff, Chris focuses on the West Coast because he writes (orused to at least) the Bay Area Travel Blog for the SF Chronicle. Many of us Left Coast would ne screwed without him since we are routinely ignored by people living east of the Mississippi.
Besides, as I responded to your last comment, as Delta’s fortress hub, moody is adding routes to ATL for fun.
My biggest gripe with them is that they don’t add any Southern touches to their service. It seems as boring an airline to fly as Atlanta or Charlotte are to visit. (That was a joke, of course.)
Nothing out of ATL again “sigh”