Things in the Sky

I first heard Alaska was boosting it’s LA – Mexico City service last week from the always-informative Airline Route blog, and I wanted to share a couple of thoughts. The airline will be adding a second daily flight beginning this October.

I decided to ask Alaska about this move. They said when they launched this route back in 2005, they had two flights, but dropped the second in 2007.

So what’s changed? I was told that demand has been improving due to a stronger economy and that the whole swine flu crisis has now blown over.

I decided to look at the T100 data for the route – the latest month available was February so I compared that to 2009. And as you can see, a boost in traffic really helped loads, with flat capacity. (The only reason I can think of for the 30 seat capacity difference is that Alaska has two 737-800 configurations.)

I was also wondering if Mexicana’s financial troubles had anything to do with the move. Alaska tells me that it does help create an opportunity, but it wasn’t one of the primary reasons since that situation is very much in flux right now.

Right now, Mexicana is scheduled to operate 30 weekly flights from Los Angeles to Mexico City, which is eight less than in July.

So this seems like a good move – expanding as a route that is seeing better performance while taking advantage of a competitor’s weakness.

Plus, this looks great from a utilization perspective – the outbound operates as a redeye and returns to LAX the next morning, and I suspect the aircraft wouldn’t just been sitting otherwise.