Q: How is this partnership different than a traditional codeshare arrangement?
Under a traditional codeshare, the flying by the regional carrier is done on a contract basis without regard to the number of passengers onboard, the regional partner typically paints their planes into the larger carrier’s livery and their employees wear the larger company’s uniforms.
Under this marketing partnership, revenue will be shared on a pro-rated basis and SkyWest Airlines will control local availability, authorization levels and all seat inventory for the aircraft used by SkyWest. SkyWest Airlines will also assume fuel costs and will maintain all revenue and pricing responsibility for these routes.
We have gone to great lengths to ensure that passengers flying on SkyWest aircraft will know during the booking process that these flights are operated by our marketing partner, SkyWest Airlines.
Tickets for these SkyWest flights will be available through all of our booking channels, including AirTran.com, 1-800-AIR-TRAN, travel agents and others.
Q: Why isn’t SkyWest painting their planes into AirTran colors?
A couple of reasons – first, we provide our customers with a unique and I believe industry leading product and we want to make sure we continue to meet our customers’ expectations for service. Unlike traditional code share agreements, we are not going to try to mislead our customers into believing this was our service. Instead, ours is a marketing partnership with each company flying under its own livery and inflight product.
(Nah, I go there daily too)
