A few months ago, I reserved seats for us to fly from San Jose, California to Paine Field in Everett, Washington, nonstop. When I was making the reservations, I noticed that the plane was just about full.
A couple of weeks ago, we got an email saying that there had been a change to our flights. In order to land at Paine Field, we had to do a two-leg stop, either through Los Angeles or Boise, Idaho! This turned a two hour flight into a ten hour flight. We reluctantly decided to instead arrive in Seattle since that was the only way to fly up there nonstop.
Then I penned a nastygram to Alaska Air, pointing out that the San Jose to Paine Field flight was full, and I didn’t understand why they had to make this change. I pointed out that my husband and I are old and specifically wanted to arrive in the smaller Everett airport to spare ourselves the chaos and stress and greater possibility of COVID exposure of the huge Seatac airport.
The response I got thanked me up and down for my input, har. It then pointed out that “just because a flight is full doesn’t mean it’s profitable”. Well, the two-leg scenarios they had presented to us involved making long flights on a full plane, just to different destinations than we wanted. Then boarding a different plane to arrive at the small airport.
This stinks. The traffic between the Silicon Valley techy area where we are and the north-of-Seattle techy area where we want to go should be large enough to support this nonstop flight. I’m not looking forward to hiking all over Seatac and taking a long shuttle ride to a car rental place, not to mention the long drive to northern Washington afterwards.
And just now when I went to Alaska Air’s website out of curiosity to see what was up for early next year, you can again see nonstop flights from San Jose to Everett, just like when I first reserved. Damn!