Alaska Airlines keeps adding more transcontinental routes. (Image: Alaska Airlines)
In domestic route developments, Alaska can’t seem to get enough transcontinental routes; Delta extends a new seating option to smaller regional jets; Southwest takes on another intra-California market; American drops a key Caribbean route but adds a Michigan link; and Frontier expands to Puerto Rico.
Alaska Airlines is getting into several new transcontinental markets thanks to its acquisition of Virgin America, and it has been adding some of its own, like the San Jose-Newark, Portland-Orlando and San Diego-Baltimore/Washington flights it started last month. But that’s not enough for Alaska: It just announced plans to add new daily transcon flights from Portland to New York JFK and from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. And it’s not quite a transcon, but Alaska also announced plans to start flying once a day from Portland to Detroit.
The Portland-Detroit service starts August 30, followed by one daily LAX-Philadelphia flight September 1 and one daily Portland-JFK roundtrip beginning November 6. All the eastbound flights on the new routes will be red-eyes. The two Portland routes will use 737s, while the LAX-Philadelphia route will use an Airbus from the A320 family (i.e., a Virgin America plane). LAX-Philadelphia was previously served by Virgin America from 2012 to 2014.
Delta Connection CRJ-200s are getting Comfort+ seats. (Image: SkyWest)
Major carriers have been transitioning their fleets away from smaller regional jets to the larger ones preferred by passengers. Delta still has some 50-seat CRJ-200s operated by Endeavor/SkyWest, and it just announced it has started selling its extra-legroom Comfort+ seating on those planes, effective for travel beginning May 1. With this enhancement, Delta said it “will now offer Delta Comfort+ on nearly all single-cabin delta Connection aircraft, in addition to its two-cabin aircraft.”
Delta’s announcement didn’t say how many Comfort+ seats the CRJ-200s would have, or how much extra pitch they would offer, or what would happen to seat pitch for the regular economy seats on those aircraft.
Southwest is starting service from Long Beach to Sacramento. (Image: Long Beach Airport)
Southwest Airlines, which started flying out of southern California’s Long Beach Airport last year with several flights a day to Oakland, has been eager to expand at Long Beach if only it could get more slots there. Well, it recently picked up a couple of slots given up by American, and said it will use them to begin twice-daily flights from Long Beach to Sacramento starting August 1.
American Airlines has been flying from New York JFK to San Juan, Puerto Rico for more than 45 years. But it has decided to give up that market on August 22, when it will eliminate its two daily flights on the route. AA still will fly to San Juan from several other hubs. Elsewhere, American Eagle has started up new service from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Washington D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, operating 12 flights a week.
While American is cutting capacity to San Juan, Frontier Airlines is adding it. Frontier is due to begin daily flights from Philadelphia and Orlando to San Juan on June 11, operating one daily A321 roundtrip on each route.
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Here is the answer to Delta’s CRJ200 “Comfort+” seats. The existing first row (bulkhead seats–1ABCD) will be reclassified as Comfort+ seats. The seats will have a bit more padding added to them and they will be labelled as Comfort+ seats. The seats will not be moved, will not have more legroom or more recline and will not receive any special services on flights less than 900 miles (as is the case for pretty much all of these flights). I have confirmed this information with Delta. So, don’t get your hopes up. For an upcoming flight in May (the product officially begins on May 1), I was “upgraded” from my chosen aisle seat (2C) to the “Comfort Plus” seat 1A ( a bulkhead window). When I called the agent to be moved out of 1A, she indicated that there are no meaningful changes being made to make this similar to any other Delta Comfort+ product and that most people who have been “upgraded” seem to be calling to be downgraded to a non-bulkhead (usually aisle) seat. Earlier today, I flew on a Delta CRJ200 from MSP-MSN. That plane had already been partially transitioned to Comfort+ although not yet being sold as such. The most noticeable change was a sticker in the luggage rack above 1A indicating “Reserved for Comfort+ Passengers.”
This is off-topic. The Travel Skills web pages for today include spontaneous audio and video in ads. This is obnoxious and annoying. Chris, I hope that you have enough influence to get this crap off of the Travel Skills web pages.
AA’s decision to drop JFK-San Juan is pretty amazing not only because they have been flying it for 46 years but also because it was one of the core “trunk” routes that AA ran from JFK (often flying 5+ times a day and on wide-body jets for most of those 46 years). After the Transcons to California (and for AA that really means LA), San Juan was the big route from JFK on American. Plus AA was the dominant carrier on the route with Eastern, TWA, Pan Am, (Tower?) among others being also-rans. This shows just how much times have changed and how much JetBlue has eaten into routes with mostly leisure/family travelers from NYC.