Alaska Air Partners American

The historic location of Alaska Airways as the dominating carrier in Seattle made it essential for companies that wanted to collect connection services for long-haul Seattle outings.

When Alaska Air acquired its smaller competitor Virgin America two years ago, it emphasized its global partnership as an important resource for sales synergy. Since the announcement of the fusion, however, it has been steadily loosing partners internationally, mainly due to an outage with Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL).

Last year, Alaska Airlines dropped several large airlineships. of Alaska Airlines. As Alaska Airlines fought back this weekend, they announced a new Intermline and FFP deal with Irish Aer Lingus. Nevertheless, Alaska must continue to work to find new partners internationally in order to compensate for the losses of others who break links with the carriers.

Five years ago Delta Air Lines was the most important business associate of Alaska Airlines. It was Delta's intention to address United Continental's domination of the Pacific Ocean Pacific by establishing an intercontinental portal in Seattle. Delta's intention was to use the relationship with Alaska to create the connection necessary for the success of these new ocean lanes.

Soon afterwards Delta Air Lines ruled that it had to become self-sufficient in Seattle. The company began to add national and intercontinental short-haul services at a fast rate, making the Alaska Airlines alliance unnecessary. Consequently, at the end of 2016, the two airlines heralded that they would cancel their code share and FFP contracts with effect from 1 May 2017.

Delta seems to have persuaded several of its own partners to stop working with Alaska since then. The Aeromexico ended its relationship with Alaska at the end of last year, and Air France and KLM will do the same by April 30th. As well as holding non-controlling interests in each of these carriers, Delta also has JVs with all three.

Delta's Atlanta-based carrier seems likely to have put pressure on its partners to use Delta solely to provide access services in the US. Delta Air Lines has used aggressively competing tactics against Alaska Air. This is Delta Air Lines. Following these outages, Alaska Airlines will be reduced to 14 airlines.

This figure contains several incumbents who are unlikely to have much connection to Alaska. Alaska Airlines on Tuesday announces a comprehensive alliance with Aer Lingus. This carrier already operates flights to Los Angeles and San Francisco - where Alaska now has a strong foothold due to its Virgin America acquisitions - and will also fly to Seattle in May.

Aero Lingus provides connections via Dublin to most of Europe's large towns, increasing the value of this relationship. Indeed, Dublin is quite a comfortable point of communication as it has a US frontier post that allows travellers to bypass duty when they get to the USA. Can Alaska Air take advantage of this great chance?

Alaska Air will withdraw the Virgin America mark next week and operate a unique booking system. With this step, the partners will gain full use of the former Virgin America rail system located in California. This is especially important because Los Angeles and San Francisco have far more global departures than Seattle.

Alaska' s extended California footprint, however, poses risks to some of its partners. While American Airlines has a Los Angeles base, United has a Los Angeles and San Francisco base. For example, the increased Alaska Airlines footprint in California can generate a similar momentum to that in Seattle with Delta -- i.e. Americans and United can try to put pressures on their own partners not to work with Alaska.

The Alaska Airlines must provide better value for money to multinational airlines than its competitors. Alaska should be able to attract many extra partners internationally to help its California long-term expansion plan. Adam Levine-Weinberg owns stakes in the Alaska Air Group and Delta Air Lines.