Imagine you are a company who specializes in painting aircraft.  Imagine just how exciting mergers like the Delta/Northwest and Continental/United mergers must be for your business outlook.

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Volaris starts up service between Guadalajara, Mexico and Chicago on December 13th and, yes, they’re serving Chicago Midway Airport.  This is clearly part of the interline/codeshare agreement they’ve been working on with Southwest Airlines. 

They’re currently offering service to Los Angeles, Oakland and San Jose and I’m sure you see a theme here, too.  They are all Southwest cities.   The initial announcement on the partnership between Southwest and Volaris included just those cities and connections being offered on Southwest’s website are for Western states primarily. 

This is a partnership that will get expanded upon quickly.  Just as I’m sure that Chicago is a part of the strategy, I think we’ll also see potential connections offered in cities such as Houston, San Antonio, Denver and maybe even Atlanta.  It’s a good fit and with Mexico regaining Category 1 status in its air system again, they can only work harder to make it worth each airlines’ effort.

This does highlight the fact that Southwest needs a reservations systems that dates at least from the 1990s.  As badly as they need it, I suspect that the Airtran system might just end up being the answer for Southwest.  It would likely be easier to transition to that system than it would be to spend time, money and effort studying all the possibilities or even building their own.  Until Southwest has this fixed, they don’t have much to offer international partners and, yet, the potential in this area is huge for Southwest.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax
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