With large swaths of the United States currently enveloped in a weekslong heat wave, the thought of snowy mountain caps and afternoons spent skiing sound more appealing than ever.
Airlines, meanwhile, are already working on their networks for the winter season. This week, Delta Air Lines (DAL) announced that it will be amping up its routes to destinations like Vail, Steamboat Springs, Bozeman and Sun Valley come November. Main competitor United Airlines (UAL) also has much market share with seasonal flights to Aspen, Mammoth, Big Sky/Bozeman, Vail and Kalispell that it brings back in frequencies depending on demand each year.
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Based out of Seattle and the go-to airline for many smaller cities on or near the West Coast, Alaska Airlines (ALK) just announced its own spate of new flights to ski destinations that it will start running at the end of the year.
The upscale ski resort of Vail is an entirely new destination for Alaska. On Dec. 20, the airline will debut two routes there from Seattle and San Francisco that will run three times a week each on an Embraer 175 (ERJ) until March 25, 2025.
Alaska Airlines wants you to ‘set off for your favorite winter getaway’
Other new snowy flights announced by Alaska include one from the Idaho capital of Boise straight to Bozeman — the Montana city is just outside the world-famous Big Sky ski resort.
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While Alaska Airlines already offered service between the British Columbia city of Kelowna and Seattle, this winter it will launch a new flight there from Los Angeles. Sitting at the edge of Okanagan Lake, Kelowna welcomes visitors to the nearby Big White Ski Resort in the winter and those pining after lakeside living or touring Canada’s wine country in the summer. This particular route is set to launch on Dec. 19 and will run daily until March 17, 2025 also on an Embraer 175.
"We're thrilled to offer convenient connection for guests across our network with this expansion – whether checking destinations off their bucket lists or setting off to their favorite winter getaways," Alaska Airlines Vice President of Network Planning Kirsten Amrine said in a statement. “We've put together an exciting range of options from tropical destinations across Mexico to the most popular ski slopes in North America."
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More of a sun person? Here are some other routes that Alaska will launch this year
The tropical flights mentioned by Amrine include a number of new routes to sunny destinations that Alaska announced at the same time as the snowy ones — a flight between San Diego and Reno, Boise and Orlando and new routes to Orlando and Tucson from Sacramento.
The airline also announced a number of new routes to international destinations such as Puerto Vallarta (flights to the resort city on the Pacific Coast from New York’s JFK Airport, California’s Sacramento and Missouri’s Kansas City are all set to launch in January 2025), Los Cabos and Guadalajara in Mexico.
Amid growing tourism demand, the airline is also launching two flights to the Costa Rican city of Liberia from San Francisco and Seattle. While scheduled only once a week, the two routes will run between December and May on a Boeing (BA) 737 jet.
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