Southwest Airlines has announced that it is canceling its codeshare agreement with WestJet due to numerous and untenable changes requested by WestJet to the original agreement.  Read the Dallas Morning News story HERE.

Why am I unsurprised? 

It would appear that WestJet’s new leadership wants a new direction and, more important, wants to play with Delta.  The upside to that is who wouldn’t want Delta feeding you traffic?  Delta is huge and has a large network.  The downside is that when you play with Delta, you are, by definition, the junior partner in such an arrangement.  CEO Saretsky of WestJet and formerly of Alaska Airlines probably sees multiple codeshares with WestJet as being the best route going forward.  Coincidentally, this is a strategy that Alaska Airlines has followed for many years. 

Also, coincidentally, Alaska Airlines has recently made moves to be closer to Delta. 

Is this good for WestJet?  Actually, I really don’t think so.  They had an opportunity to be an equal partner in a 3 way North American partnership that would have linked Canada, Mexico and the United States with 3 very good LCC carriers.  Service types would match, service philosophies would match and each partner was potentially already prepared to cooperate on things more than just a codeshare.  I’m sorry to see this happen as it would have been a great experiment and one I thought had lots of potential.

So, where does that leave SWA?  Well, they aren’t saying much other than to just leave the door open to the possibilty of international flights which they’ve done for years now.  It doesn’t really reveal anything.  However, I suspect they’ve already made a subtantial investment in bringing this capability to their IT systems and they’ll probably pursue it to its conclusion if only to continue on with Volaris, their Mexican partner in this deal. 

I think that SWA will pursue flights to Canada.  It’s just too easy for them not to do so.  The logistics are surmountable in this case.  They may pursue the start of codeshare cooperation with Volaris to Mexico as their first goal but I suspect their very next goal will be flights to Canada and lots of them at that.  In fact, Volaris can fly those US/Mex flights to SWA focus cities and let SWA carry traffic onward to Canadian destinations.  There is a lot of Canadian / Mexican travel these days.   I’m not sure if current treaties would allow codeshares via SWA between Canada and Mexico but I already see one way of getting around that. 

One thing that does stand out is Southwest’s recurring statement about how “hard wired” they are for domestic travel.  No one doubts that but they’ve been saying that for 2 years now.  Most airlines would have gotten past that hurdle by now and it makes me wonder that SWA appears no closer to engaging in their Mexican codeshare yet.  In fact, the WestJet codeshare was supposed to start first and even now SWA’s statements make it sound as if they’re just getting around to the challenge.  Not good. 

Also interesting is that, so far, I’ve not found any statements by WestJet on this new development.  They are curiously quiet and I wonder about that.

Filed under: Airline History by ajax