Virgin Alaska’s Newark Growth Continues

I've got to weigh in. I live in north Menlo Park (one block from Redwood City border). Travel time is almost equal to SJC and SFO. OAK is not a lot further. I'll take SJC ANY DAY over SFO or OAK. SFO has so many weather delays and SJC has almost none. OAK is too small - no lounge at all and few options when there are problems. I agree with Andrew that I wish there were more transcon flights out of SJC but nothing beats the vacation departure to Hawaii out of SJC! On top of the on time performance, the Priority Pass lounge in SJC is quite nice for a domestic lounge and never crowded. Traffic is almost always less of a hassle to SJC than SFO and as noted many people fly to SJC because their business location is closer. I would hazard a guess that the bay area sees more business travelers than the City sees vacationers. When I lived in PDX I flew to SJC 26 times a year and to SFO - 0 SFO is a lovely airport if you can battle your way to and from it and the weather is kind to you but that's the exception, not the rule. I avoid it if I can.

A couple responses on SFO vs. SJC. 1. People love to cite the statistic that SJ has more people than SF. It has a lower daytime population though, and is obviously much smaller than the whole SF metro area (though, granted, there is another airport in Oakland too). Certainly for anyone in SF, the East Bay, or Marin, SJC is not even on the radar. And if you're farther up the peninsula (e.g. Redwood City, San Carlos, etc.), SFO is more convenient. 2. All of that leaves out the incoming traffic of non Bay Area residents, who overwhelmingly are coming to visit SF. SJ is not a destination city for anyone. Convenient if your destination is Big Sur or something, but that's obviously tiny compared to the SF tourist market. 3. The SJC flights are more expensive because there are far fewer of them. There are far fewer of them because there is far less demand. SFO-SLC often costs considerably more than SFO-JFK too. So SJC will probably always be a second-tier airport (versus SFO), because it makes sense. I doubt it makes sense for Alaska to keep all of its SJC routes once it picks up VX's SFO routes, but I guess we'll see. Slightly OT: it seems a little crazy that we have as many international airports in the Bay Area as they have in the NYC metro, given how comparatively tiny we are. It just seems like there must be massive economic inefficiencies lurking there. Granted, JFK alone can probably handle more traffic than all three of our airports combined.

As a EWR flyer, I enjoy this. Anything to give me more options over United.

What Andrew said. SFO is my last choice of airport in the Bay no matter where I'm starting from. I'd rather ride the BART/Air Train to OAK then mess with SFO weather delays.

Alaska needs to do something about it's inflight catering in F. The first quarter Alaska rolled out the small plate idea as a trial, at first it had it's issues, but smoothed out, then Alaska pulled it and went back to it's old catering way. What is served in F on Alaska Flights is horrible, worse then AA. So Alaska went out over paid for XV and will do what with it? Turn it into AS with horrible FC seats and horrible FC Catering. Its sad that FC passengers get worse food then what can he had in Y on BOB and now AS charges F pax for BOB meals