In route news, Southwest will open up more Oakland routes in March and will add two more California airports to its network; Mineta San Jose introduces COVID testing; Alaska sets a date for SFO-Anchorage flights; Hawaiian stops blocking middle seats; a COVID passenger dies on a United flight; United teams up with XpresSpa for airport testing and launches a contact tracing effort; JetBlue will add Miami to its route map and offers new TrueBlue perks; Frontier expands at Miami and Las Vegas; Singapore rolls out a new program to get business travelers into the country; Delta and JetBlue add South America service; and financial woes get deeper for Mexico’s Interjet.
Southwest Airlines will add another new Oakland route starting March 11, introducing daily flights to Tucson – its second destination in Arizona after Phoenix. In the same month, Southwest said, it will resume service out of OAK on three transcontinental routes that have been suspended for several months due to the pandemic – Atlanta, Orlando and Baltimore/Washington.
Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines’ route map will soon be putting pins into two more California airports as the carrier continues to expand in the state. The airline already has an extensive presence in northern and southern California, and now it will fill in the gap between those regions by adding service to Santa Barbara and Fresno Yosemite International Airport during the second quarter of 2021, Southwest said this week. As with its other recent new airport announcements, Southwest hasn’t yet said where it will fly from those cities. Last month, Southwest started flying out of Palm Springs, with service to Oakland, Phoenix and Denver, and earlier this month it unveiled plans to add new routes in March at Long Beach Airport, including Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, Reno and Dallas.
However, the pandemic continues to take a heavy toll on airline revenues, including Southwest’s, and the airline said in a letter to California’s Employment Development Department this week that it might have to slash hundreds of jobs at Bay Area airports by March unless something changes. That could include 573 jobs at Oakland Airport, 275 at Mineta San Jose and 158 at San Francisco International.
Mineta San Jose International has opened up on-site drive-through COVID testing for Hawaii-bound passengers on Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines and will make the service available to all travelers starting next week. Advance appointments between 7:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. are required for the testing facilities, located at the airport’s taxi staging area at 2470 Airport Blvd. in San Jose. Testing for Alaska passengers, priced at $170, is handled by Carbon Health, while Hawaiian Airlines travelers will pay $90 for testing by WorkSite Labs. Both providers are certified by the State of Hawaii, which requires visitors to be tested no more than 72 hours before departure from the mainland. Here are the appointment scheduling links for Alaska and for Hawaiian, and here are more details on the SJC program.
The Bay Area will get another new route in June 2021, when Alaska Airlines plans to introduce the San Francisco-Anchorage service that was supposed to begin last April but was delayed by the pandemic. The carrier said it will offer daily seasonal flights between SFO-Anchorage from June 17 through Aug. 16. That route is part of a larger Anchorage expansion by Alaska Airlines, which will also include new flights from Anchorage to Las Vegas, Denver and Phoenix.
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Airlines’ practice of blocking middle seats from their bookable inventory to provide a bit of social distancing for passengers continues to fade away. This week, Hawaiian Airlines became the latest carrier to discontinue the practice, a change that it had announced last month. Other airlines that still block seats include Alaska, which will continue to do so until Jan. 6; and Delta, which remains committed to an empty-middle-seat policy through the end of March.
COVID-19 continues to dominate airline news these days. On the negative news side, a passenger on a United flight this week from Orlando to Los Angeles died en route after the flight diverted to New Orleans – and, unknown to United when he boarded, that passenger reportedly had the coronavirus. After the passenger was removed from the plane and taken to a hospital, the United flight continued on to LAX with the same aircraft, according to the View from the Wing blog that first reported the incident. “With all the effort airlines are putting into sanitizing planes, not doing so after a passenger with the virus died on board is shocking,” the site commented – although it conceded that it’s unclear at what point United learned about the man’s COVID diagnosis. Here's some TMZ video of the incident that came out over the weekend.
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On the positive side, United just announced a new partnership with XpresSpa Group to provide COVID testing at that company’s XpresCheck airport facilities, starting with its locations at Newark Liberty and Denver International Airport. The partnership starts Dec. 21. “Our partnership with United Airlines will start with select flights to Hawaii in two major hub airports and expand to additional cities as our plans continue to develop,” said XpresSpa Group’s CEO Doug Satzman. The agreement provides for rapid molecular testing at the airports. “Passengers who are found to test positive from a rapid test are informed that they must exit the airport and self-isolate per CDC guidelines, along with anyone whom they are traveling with,” XpresSpa Group said. (The XpresSpa at SFO's Terminal 2 remains closed for now.)
Meanwhile, United also said this week that it has started working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect passenger contact data. “During the check-in process, United customers will be prompted to voluntarily opt-in and provide contact information such as an email address, phone numbers and an address of where they will be once they reach their destination, details that were previously difficult for the CDC to obtain in real-time,” the airline said. The effort started this week with international arriving passengers and will be expanded in the coming weeks to cover domestic and international outbound travelers. Passengers can opt-in and participate via the airline’s mobile app, its website, or at the airport.
What’s the busiest airport in the U.S. not currently served by JetBlue? It’s Miami International. But that will change on Feb. 11, when JetBlue will start flying to MIA from Los Angeles International, New York JFK, Boston and Newark. The airline’s LAX-MIA flights will operate up to twice a day and will feature JetBlue’s premium-cabin Mint service. Airline service between the northeast and south Florida is already heavily competitive, so JetBlue will operate up to four flights a day in each of those three markets. JetBlue already serves Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Beach, and on Feb. 11 it will also add new service to Key West from JFK and Boston, with four weekly flights on both routes. On June 17, the airline plans to begin new daily service from its growing Los Angeles focus city to San Jose del Cabo.
In other news, JetBlue this week unveiled some big changes coming to its TrueBlue loyalty program in 2021. Members who have achieved Mosaic elite status will be able to bring a companion along for free on flights booked through their Customer Support hotline and flown from Jan. 1 to May 20 – with no limit on the number of free companion flights. Meanwhile, Mosaics will also be able to request a same-day upgrade to an “Even More Space” seat (i.e., JetBlue’s extra-legroom seating) when they request it through the Mosaic desk, ticket counter or gate. “Requests will be honored in the order they are received, pending availability,” JetBlue said. The airline is also extending throughout 2021 its reduced qualification thresholds for Mosaic status, which are half what they were before the pandemic – e.g., 7,500 qualifying points vs. the previous 15,000, or 6,000 points/15 segments vs. the former 12,000/30. You can see the details here. The airline is also extending through Jan. 31, 2021 an offer of 100,000 bonus points to members who sign up for a JetBlue Plus Card.
Miami is attracting a lot of attention from airlines these days. In addition to the new JetBlue service mentioned above, Southwest Airlines added MIA to its network last month with initial service to Tampa, Baltimore/Washington, Houston and Chicago. And now Frontier Airlines is announcing new flights from MIA to six destinations, both domestic and international. In February, Frontier will start daily service between MIA and Orlando followed by four flights a week to Ontario, Calif., beginning in April. This week, Frontier introduced three weekly flights from MIA to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to be followed by four weekly flights to Cancun starting in March and service to Guatemala City, Guatemala and San Salvador, El Salvador in April.
Frontier is also growing at Las Vegas, with plans to begin service twice a week on March 11 to El Paso, Little Rock, Oklahoma City and Wichita, along with twice-weekly flights to Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos starting March 25 and 26.
In international news, Singapore will introduce a new program next month to expedite arrivals for select pre-approved travelers from all countries who intend to stay no longer than 14 days. The new Connect@Singapore program will be available to “a limited number of business, official, and high economic value travelers,” a government official said, with applications opening up in mid-January. Participants will have to obtain a negative COVID PCR test result before leaving home, get another test upon arrival, stay at an approved facility during their visit, and obey all relevant health safety rules. They’ll also have to undergo a series of Antigen Rapid Tests over the course of their stay. Participants will be able to meet with their local and international colleagues during their stay, but they’ll have to use customized meeting rooms with air-tight glass panels. The government is developing special lodging/meeting facilities at its convention center to host the participating visitors. (SFO-Singapore nonstop flights resumed last week.)
South America is getting more service from U.S. carriers. Delta this week resumed service from its Atlanta hub to Santiago, Chile; Quito, Ecuador; and Buenos Aires, Argentina, all with 767 aircraft. With those destinations, Delta said, it now flies to 35 destinations in the Latin America/Caribbean region. And JetBlue has introduced service between New York JFK and Georgetown, Guyana, with four A321neo flights a week.
Mexico’s financially troubled Interjet, which temporarily stopped flying in early November, doesn’t seem to be getting any healthier. The low-cost airline (which once served SFO with flights to Mexico City and Cancun) has now grounded its aircraft for the third time in three months and reportedly doesn’t expect to resume service before the first of the year. The carrier’s biggest problem seems to be a lack of funds to pay for fuel, although it has also had trouble paying its employees during the ongoing crisis and reportedly owes the government more than $300 million in unpaid taxes. It got to the point where the Mexican government’s consumer protection agency warned the public to think twice before booking a trip on Interjet, and now the International Air Transport Assn. has suspended the carrier’s participation in its Billing and Settlement Plan, which coordinates payments from IATA-appointed travel agencies to member airlines.
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Chris McGinnis is SFGATE's senior travel correspondent. You can reach him via email or follow him on Twitter or Facebook. Don't miss a shred of important travel news by signing up for his FREE weekly email updates!
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