Alaska Airlines’ Surprising Florida Expansion

Alaska Airlines has today announced 10 new routes, five of which are to Florida, and come as quite a surprise to me.

Alaska Airlines adding new LAX routes

Alaska Airlines has revealed seven new routes out of LAX, which complements a recent announcement from the company about five new routes out of LAX. This means that in total Alaska is adding a dozen new routes out of LAX in 2020.

With this latest development, Alaska Airlines is launching the following nonstop flights from LAX:

• Daily service to Eugene as of October 1, 2020, using Embraer 175s
• Daily service to Medford as of October 1, 2020, using Embraer 175s
• Daily service to Bozeman as of November 20, 2020, using Embraer 175s
• 4x weekly service to Fort Myers as of November 20, 2020, using 737s
• Daily service to Tampa as of November 20, 2020, using 737s
• 3x weekly service to Kona as of December 17, 2020, using 737s
• 4x weekly service to Lihue as of December 18, 2020, using 737s

Alaska is launching seven new routes from LAX

Of these, what I find most interesting is the following:

• Alaska is continuing to add flights to Tampa, complementing the existing Seattle service; Alaska will be going head-to-head against Delta and Southwest in this market
• The Fort Myers route came as a surprise, as this will be the first nonstop flight between the West Coast and Fort Myers; given the lack of service from Southwestern Florida otherwise, along with the limited frequency, I could see this working

Alaska Airlines’ Florida expansion

In total Alaska Airlines is adding five new routes to Florida. There are the two routes above (from Los Angeles to Fort Myers and Tampa) and on top of that Alaska Airlines will add the following routes:

• 4x weekly service from Portland to Fort Lauderdale as of November 20, 2020, using 737s
• 4x weekly service from Seattle to Fort Myers as of November 21, 2020, using 737s
• 3x weekly service from San Diego to Fort Lauderdale as of November 21, 2020, using 737s

Wowzers:

• Alaska won’t just be launching one route to Fort Myers, but rather two routes, which is quite impressive
• The Portland and San Diego service to Fort Lauderdale complements Alaska’s existing service to Fort Lauderdale from Los Angeles and Seattle

Alaska is launching five new routes to Florida

There are so many route surprises lately

This pandemic has crushed the airline industry, and most of us probably wouldn’t have expected many new route announcements or partnerships around this time. After all, we’d expect airlines to restore existing routes before launching new ones, given how slowly demand is recovering.

However, in many ways we’ve seen the opposite. While capacity as such hasn’t been added back fast, we’ve seen so many new route and partnership announcements from airlines.

From American Airlines’ expansion at SEA, to American Airlines’ expansion at JFK, to JetBlue’s expansion at LAX, there have been quite a few surprises throughout all of this. Here’s to hoping that creativity continues.

Both Alaska and JetBlue are expanding at LAX

Bottom line

It’s great to see Alaska Airlines expanding out of LAX, and also adding more Florida service. Alaska is adding a total of five transcon routes to Florida, including Fort Myers’ first-ever service to the West Coast.

It’s awesome to see this kind of expansion, especially since it comes as a surprise to most of us. Who would have expected this kind of growth during the biggest pandemic to ever hit the airline industry?

What do you make of Alaska Airlines’ new routes?

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