Southwest Airlines issued THIS press statement on April 1st in response to WestJet’s comments on forming a codeshare agreement with Delta.  The part that really catches my eye is this:

“A codeshare between WestJet and Delta, as indicated in media reports, could be inconsistent with the agreement presently in place between Southwest and WestJet.”

 

It’s not good when one party is responding to the other in the press.  One would presume that someone at SWA attempted to find out what is going on at WestJet and was either ignored or given no substantive information.  Ordinarily, SWA doesn’t really play things out like this in the press.  Clearly a message needed to be sent. 

And the message does clear up some things with respect to SWA.  Apparently there has been communication and agreement going on between the airlines in this partnership and apparently SWA is on schedule (at least internally) to start this codeshare.  Well, that’s good news.

A little context on WestJet’s part.  Their CEO, Saretsky, is brand new in the job and made his comments before officially becoming CEO on April 1st.  Their former CEO, Sean Durfy, is relatively young and relatively new in the CEO position (about 2.5 years).   I’m beginning to wonder if there is some dissatisfaction with the leadership of this airline on the part of the chairman (and founder), Clive Beddoe.  I’m also wondering if Saretsky wasn’t speaking a bit out of turn when indicating a preference towards Delta rather than Southwest. 

I also question whether WestJet can really be bought off by the world’s largest airline with an offer of a few New York City slot pairs and the promise of some feed into the Canadian network of WestJet.  The more I think about this, the more it occurs to me that Delta quite likely is already flying to most destinations it requires in Canada via connections in Salt Lake City, Minneapolis/St.Paul, Detroit and New York City.  In other words, is Delta playing WestJet in order to make Southwest uncompetitive in New York City and is WestJet really that naive?

Southwest’s announcement also seems to indicate that they’re willing to press on to Canada and why shouldn’t they?  With the IT upgrades done, there really isn’t a reason why they can’t start flying to quite a few destinations in Canada and no reason why they can’t do it as economically as they would any US destination.  I’m sure we’ll hear more about this relationship in the coming weeks.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax