Alaska Airlines scraps route from San Francisco to Dallas Love Field

Alaska Airlines is making more changes to its route network.

The Seattle-based carrier filed plans over the weekend to drop service between San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and Dallas Love Field (DAL), as first seen in Cirium schedules and later confirmed by a carrier spokesperson.

This 1,476-mile route, which originally launched in 2018, will no longer be operated by Alaska as of April 10.

"We'll focus service from the Bay Area to DFW," said an airline spokesperson in response to the cut.

Alaska flies from Seattle and Portland, Oregon, to the much larger (and, for many, less convenient) Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW).

SFO to DAL is exactly the type of route that Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci no longer wants the airline to fly. With a recovery in business travel still lagging, the airline, which operates hubs in two Big Tech metropolises — San Francisco and Seattle — struggled to quickly adjust its network to reflect the post-coronavirus pandemic reality.

The airline lost over $100 million during the first quarter of last year — a quarter usually buoyed by business travelers — and Minicucci's response to that significant loss was to charge the network planners with finding more leisure-focused flights to warm-weather destinations.

For Alaska, that includes launching new service from Los Angeles and Seattle to the Bahamas, as well as new flights to places like Guatemala and Zihuatanejo along Mexico's Pacific coast.

But a route like SFO to DAL appeals much more to a business traveler than a sun-seeker, so it's likely no surprise that Alaska will terminate this service. (The airline will maintain flights to this Dallas airport from Seattle.)

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This isn't the first time Alaska has modified its network to align with its new leisure-focused strategy. Late last year, the airline dropped its two longest routes from Boise (to Austin and Chicago), and it also plans to cut flights between San Jose, California, and Austin later this year.

Looking ahead to the summer, Alaska is also shifting service between Everett, Washington's Paine Field (PAE) and Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) to a winter-only schedule.

This PAE-to-HNL flight will end on May 15 and resume on Oct. 1. Instead, Alaska plans to "enable some other flying in Everett during the peak summer season this year," a carrier spokesperson told TPG.

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