• Why is Alaska Air buying Hawaiian?

    From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Mon Dec 11 02:04:16 2023
    Reports say that Alaska Air has offered to buy Hawaiian, offering a
    price way above Hawaiian's current depressed share price. I don't see
    the point.

    They compete in markets between the west coast and Hawaii, but there's
    a lot of other competition from United and Southwest so it's not like
    they're going to get any market power. Alaska has a sparse network
    from places in the east and midwest to the west coast, and I suppose
    they could add connections to Hawaii but they could do that with code
    shares.

    I've seen suggestions to turn Honolulu into a hub for trans-Pacific
    flights. That makes sense if you're going to Australia or N.Z. and
    probably southeast Asia since direct flights from the east coast to
    S.E. Asia now have to take long detours to avoid Russia. It's too far
    south for connections Japan or Korea. There's a lot of vacation
    traffic between Japan and Hawaii but merging wouldn't help that.

    What am I missing?
    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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