Alsaka airlines began
service to St. Louis at the tail end of 2010 and has seen slow, but continued growth over the intervening decade. The airline has grown it daily service between Seattle and St. Louis with almost 1200 flights (twice daily service) on the route in 2018. It looked like Alaska was set to grow its footprint beyond just flights to Seattle adding Portland as a destination in 2015 and starting San Diego service at the end of 2017. However, after hitting a record passenger count of 214k in 2018, they appear to taking a step backward this year since ending service to Portland in 2018. The Seattle service remains strong (although they did shift to only a single daily flight for awhile earlier this year), but as Alaska grows it west coast operations, it will also be ending its San Deigo route next month and it
does not appear to be very interested in adding as many new routes to the Midwest.
Overall, Alaska has consistent service to Seattle on 737 Mainline flights which offers another option to travelers headed to the Pacific Northwest. While I'm sure many people would love to see more West Coast destinations, the 200k passengers served is a nice if small addition to the airport's overall numbers. Those numbers look like they will be trending down for at least the short term furture though. Hopefully, in the future more of the West Coast routes can come back and the numbers will rebound.
Annual Alaska Numbers for all routes
|
2010 |
2011 |
2012 |
2013 |
2014 |
2015 |
2016 |
2017 |
2018 |
| Departures |
374 |
759 |
806 |
794 |
802 |
1,259 |
1,889 |
1,961 |
2,035 |
| Passengers |
50,410 |
103,121 |
110,096 |
108,555 |
117,813 |
159,543 |
212,891 |
202,598 |
214,010 |
Charts and Graphs are best viewed on a desktop. If on phone, hold horizontal for best viewing.
When breaking down the individual routes, Seattle clearly dominates to overall passenger numbers. The Portland and San Diego routes were/are both flown on Seattle's regional carrier Horizon and utilize the E175 regional planes. For Portland, while the load factor was high throughout its service (88% over it's final 140 flights in 2018), using the smaller plane on a longer route may have squeezed the economics of the flight
which it competed on with Southwest. However, the San Diego route utilizes the same plane to fly a similar distance and had a lower load factor (and even lower average fare) than Portland, but surived at least for now while Portland was removed.
Looking at Alaska's O&D numbers, they rank first for travel to/from Seattle and (unsurprisingly) Alaska, with Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska being the top O&D destinations outside of SEA, PDX, and SAN. They also pick up a significant portion of passengers to smaller cities in the Pacific Northwest and West Coast in general ranking first in travelers to/from Bellingham and Yakima, WA as well as Bend, OR and second for Pasco, WA as well as Eugene, and Medford, OR. Note that the O&D number start to get pretty small near the bottom of the table, so there could be a significant amount of error in the actual numbers on the low end.
When looking at the fare prices, Alaska performs well on a couple of comparable routes. For example, when looking at service to Hawaii, Alaska's avg fare price of $384.84 to Honolulu comes in well below American's $491.91. I should note that, Alaska is flying less than 10% of the number of passengers that American is flying to the same destination, and it's possible that connections to Hawaii are not well timed with St. Louis' flights, but Alaska has offered some reasonable fares for those travelers heading West and willing to connect through Seattle. Check out more in the number below!