Alaska Airlines is reshaping its West Coast and Mexico flying again, ending seven routes while bringing back a California corridor it suspended earlier this year.
The seven routes coming out
The cuts, disclosed on August 30, 2026, are concentrated in northern California and Mexican leisure markets:
- Puerto Vallarta (PVR) to New York John F. Kennedy (JFK)
- Puerto Vallarta (PVR) to Sacramento (SMF)
- Puerto Vallarta (PVR) to St. Louis Lambert (STL)
- Sacramento (SMF) to Los Cabos (SJD)
- San Luis Obispo (SBP) to Las Vegas Harry Reid (LAS)
- Santa Rosa's Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County (STS) to Ontario (ONT)
- Santa Rosa (STS) to Salt Lake City (SLC)
Three of the seven touch Puerto Vallarta, and the carrier is not resuming its seasonal Puerto Vallarta services from Sacramento, St. Louis or New York JFK next year. Two more Santa Rosa routes disappear entirely, which thins the schedule at one of the smallest airports in Alaska's California network.
San Jose-Los Angeles returns November 1
The offsetting move is the restoration of nonstop service between San Jose's Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. The route, which Alaska first launched in 2017 and suspended in January of this year, returns on November 1 with four daily flights operated by Boeing 737 aircraft. Simple Flying reports the flights will use the 173-seat Boeing 737-900, configured with 157 economy seats and 16 business class seats.
Alaska had cut San Jose-Los Angeles alongside several other California services from San Jose, Los Angeles and San Francisco, citing slower-than-expected new aircraft deliveries in 2026. Restoring it now suggests the airline has enough narrowbody capacity to cover a short, high-frequency intra-California corridor where four daily departures matter far more to travellers than aircraft size.
Reading the pattern
Taken together, the changes look less like retrenchment than reallocation. A four-times-daily 737 rotation between two large California metros absorbs a meaningful chunk of aircraft utilisation, and the routes being dropped are largely thin, seasonal or long-haul-from-a-leisure-airport pairings that are difficult to fill outside peak weeks. Flying Puerto Vallarta to JFK or St. Louis places a resort market at one end and a non-hub at the other, a structure that leaves little room for connecting traffic to fill the aircraft when demand softens.
The San Luis Obispo-Las Vegas and Santa Rosa cuts follow similar logic in miniature: small catchment areas served point-to-point, competing against easy drives and, in the Las Vegas case, a crowded low-fare field.
What it means for passengers
Travellers holding bookings on the discontinued routes should expect rebooking options over Alaska's larger West Coast airports rather than direct replacements, since none of the seven pairings has an obvious substitute in the network. For the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the practical effect is the opposite: an intra-California option that vanished in January is back with enough frequency to be useful for day trips.
Airlines routinely adjust seasonal schedules, and Alaska has moved capacity around its California markets more than once this year as deliveries have arrived later than planned.
Sources: The Bulkhead Seat, Simple Flying. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. By Marco Bianchi.
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