Alaska Airlines & Breeze Airways Launch Unusual Partnership… But Why?

Alaska Airlines and Breeze Airways have quietly launched a surprise partnership. While there’s not all that much to it as of now, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a bigger long term play here, because this isn’t something you’d expect to necessarily see.

Alaska sells Breeze tickets, awards Atmos Rewards points

Alaska Airlines has quietly started selling tickets for travel on Breeze Airways, as first flagged by Enilria, and then analyzed by Cranky Flier (thanks to 1990_ for flagging this). This partnership is based on an interline agreement, which is the most basic level of cooperation you can have between two airlines. However, it’s being taken to the next level:

• Alaska is selling tickets for travel on Breeze directly on its website; you can have an interline agreement without actually directly selling tickets on another airline
• Alaska is awarding Atmos Rewards points for travel on Breeze; there’s typically no expectation that an interline agreement comes with any sort of loyalty reciprocity

To go into a bit more detail, it seems that Alaska is selling Breeze flights, but the inverse isn’t true. Furthermore, Alaska isn’t selling mixed itineraries on Alaska and Breeze, but instead, it’s only selling Breeze flights in select nonstop markets that Breeze operates in, where the two airlines don’t compete.

So far, this only includes select flights to and from Charleston (CHS), Las Vegas (LAS), and Raleigh Durham (RDU). Let me emphasize that before anyone gets too excited about earning Atmos Rewards points for Breeze flights, I’m not sure where Alaska actually comes up with its pricing for these itineraries. The airline doesn’t get you access to all of Breeze’s fares, and they don’t actually seem to correspond directly to any of Breeze’s fare bundles.

What’s Alaska’s motive for this Breeze partnership?

On the surface, this partnership seems incredibly random. We know that Alaska and American have a close partnership, but here we’re basically seeing Alaska start to sell flights on another US carrier that it otherwise has no partnership with or connection to.

On the one hand, I suppose there’s little downside to this, since it’s not like Alaska and Breeze actually compete much. Alaska is essentially acting as an online travel agency, just getting some sort of a cut on the flight, in exchange for loyalty perks.

The current partnership very much seems to fall into the “why bother” category. I can’t imagine many flyers looking to travel from Charleston to somewhere else in the region are thinking “hey, let me go to Alaska’s website and see what’s available.” And then when they see the lack of fare options compared to Breeze’s site directly, I also can’t imagine they’re very encouraged to book.

Alaska has around $15 billion in revenue annually, and I imagine this arrangement may generate hundreds of dollars, give or take. But I suppose if we just take this at face value, we can also assume that Alaska tries to make up for its lack of global coverage through all kinds of airline partnerships, so maybe the airline is trying to grow domestic coverage through arrangements like this, and this Breeze partnership is a small trial in that direction.

Maybe there’s not much to read into here, and this is just how things will be. Or maybe there’s more to it. We’ll see…

Bottom line

Alaska Airlines and Breeze Airways have quietly launched a partnership. While this is based on an interline agreement, it goes beyond that, as Alaska is selling select flights on Breeze, and is awarding Atmos Rewards points for booking through these channels.

This is definitely an unusual arrangement, to see a US carrier sell flights on another US carrier it otherwise has no partnership with. But I guess for Alaska, it’s not that off brand, since all kinds of partnerships have long been a strong suit of the carrier.

What do you make of this Alaska and Breeze arrangement?