Alaska Airlines Adding Southern California Service for 2021

Alaska Airlines on Thursday announced that it would being flying two new routes out of Southern California this spring.

Alaska is launching daily, nonstop service out of Los Angeles and Austin on March 18, with an increase in three daily departures starting on May 20, along with new, daily nonstop service between San Diego and New York JFK on April 4.

The move was made, according to Alaska’s vice president of network and alliances, to continue to enhance Alaska’s Southern California network.

“These two new routes enhance our guest proposition in Southern California while providing valuable connectivity to our global partners as we join oneworld on March 31,” Brett Catlin said in a statement.

The additions, along with the extra 12 routes that Alaska added out of LAX in 2020, give Alaska a total of 40 nonstop flights out of LAX. The new routes also continue Alaska’s focus on building up its offerings into Austin, a city it now flies to from five West Coast cities—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego.

Alaska isn’t the only airline adding Southern California service for 2021. Southwest announced in December that it would be shifting its service to include additional routes out of Santa Barbara and Freson, Calif., the 11^th and 12^th new destination it has added during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both of those routes will kick off in the second quarter of 2021.

Those routes give Southwest 13 total California origin cities on its route map, a state that Southwest has continuously invested in during the last four decades.