Say goodbye to Virgin America.
In the wee hours on Wednesday, the Alaska Air Group formally
integrated the Virgin America flight network into the Alaska Airlines brand.
Web users who go to the virginamerica.com site are now
redirected to Alaska's website. The airlines also now have one reservation
system and one mobile app. In addition, all the former Virgin America gates,
ticket counters, check-in areas and baggage claim locations were to be
Alaska-branded beginning Wednesday.
The last Virgin America flights were operated on April 24,
including a commemorative Los Angeles-San Francisco service for employees who
helped launch the airline a decade ago.
Despite the integration, Virgin America's former fleet of 67
Airbus narrowbodies will continue to sport its livery for now. Alaska
spokeswoman Ann Johnson said the repainting of the Virgin America fleet would
begin this fall and be complete by the end of 2019. At that point, logos on
those aircraft will match the logos of Alaska's Boeing narrowbody fleet.
Johnson said Alaska has closely studied previous mergers and
applied those lessons to avoid technical snafus as the integration rolls out
this week.
"Mergers that had some visible issues contended with
technical issues that sprung from moving reservations from one system to
another," she said. "This leads to chaos, confusion and -- ultimately
-- passenger inconvenience. What we did is basically shut off Virgin America bookings
at a certain point. This means, starting on April 25, every passenger flying on
an Airbus route or Airbus aircraft has a reservation with Alaska. There's no
moving of reservations and no opportunity for additional errors along the way.
Every passenger who arrives for a flight with us on April 25 is already an
Alaska passenger, not a Virgin America passenger being moved to an Alaska
flight."
Alaska Air Group acquired Virgin America in December 2016
for $2.6 billion.
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Correction: Ann Johnson is Alaska Air's spokeswoman. She was misidentified in a previous version of this report.