Southwest Airlines has added a South Korean partner to its growing roster of interline agreements. On July 8, 2026, Air Premia announced the launch of an interline partnership with Southwest, becoming the first Korean airline to establish such a tie-up with the largest domestic carrier in the United States.
Under the deal, Air Premia becomes Southwest's ninth interline partner. The two airlines will connect through the shared gateways of Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco, allowing passengers to travel on a single ticket to more than 120 destinations across the Southwest network.
For travellers flying Air Premia from Seoul, the arrangement opens up onward connections to U.S. cities including Las Vegas, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, Portland and Nashville. Tickets for the new interline itineraries became available beginning July 8 through travel agencies and online booking channels. Southwest, for its part, also announced a separate consumer-finance partnership with Klarna alongside the Air Premia agreement.
Interline agreements stop short of the deeper commercial integration of codeshares or joint ventures, but they matter to passengers because they let a single itinerary and, typically, through-checked baggage span two carriers that otherwise have no formal relationship. For Southwest β historically a point-to-point domestic operator that has been slower than its network rivals to build international connectivity β each new interline partner extends its reach without adding a single long-haul route of its own.
Air Premia is a South Korean hybrid-service carrier that has built its long-haul network around the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, flying between Seoul and points including Los Angeles and San Francisco. The interline hands it a ready-made feed into dozens of secondary U.S. markets that would be uneconomic to serve directly, while giving Southwest a source of inbound international passengers at its West Coast and Hawaii gateways.
Southwest's domestic operation remains built almost entirely around the Boeing 737, the workhorse narrow-body that has defined the airline since its earliest days. The Air Premia tie-up is the latest sign of how the carrier is gradually weaving that vast domestic grid into the wider international system, one partner at a time.
The partnership also reflects a broader trend among Asian hybrid and low-cost carriers, which increasingly look to interline and partnership deals with large U.S. networks to stretch the value of their limited long-haul fleets.
Sources: Aviation Week, AirlineGeeks. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. By Daniel Okafor.
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