Southwest Airlines to end agreement with WestJet

By Richard N. Velotta

Published Friday, April 16, 2010 | 11:14 a.m.

Updated Friday, April 16, 2010 | 4:14 p.m.

Southwest Airlines is terminating its planned code-share agreement with Canada-based WestJet Airlines, a deal that potentially could have benefited Las Vegas tourism.

Dallas-based Southwest, the busiest carrier at McCarran International Airport, announced today that it had notified WestJet of its intent to terminate the agreement.

Under the agreement, Southwest and WestJet would have offered seamless travel on flights offered by each airline, including selling tickets on each other's Web sites and passenger and baggage transfers on connecting flights.

While few details of the agreement had been announced, Las Vegas was a logical location for the airlines to transfer passengers because Southwest has a large presence at McCarran and WestJet has flights from Las Vegas to nine Canadian destinations.

McCarran officials had helped gear for potential passenger transfers by bringing several WestJet flights into the airport's B gates, which are accessible to Southwest flights in the C gates via a recently constructed pedestrian bridge.

Southwest currently has an average 215 daily flights in and out of Las Vegas. WestJet has an average of 10 flights a day, some of it seasonal, to McCarran - twice as many as the next busiest international carrier, Air Canada. WestJet has operations to and from Montreal; Toronto; Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta; Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna, British Columbia; and Saskatoon and Regina, Saskatchewan.

The code-share agreement could have resulted in flight increases by both carriers and the potential for transferring passengers to make a stop in Las Vegas.

In Southwest's announcement today, the airline said WestJet requested significant changes in the agreement that it could not agree to.

"We prefer the existing terms of our agreement with WestJet," said Bob Jordan, executive vice president of strategy and planning. "Upon reviewing the number of changes that WestJet has requested, we have decided that it is in the best interest of both parties to move forward independently."

"We remain interested in exploring the possibility of one day offering service to Canada if it makes sense for Southwest and for our customers," he said. "That would not rule out future code-share relationships with Canadian carriers, or flying north of the border ourselves."

"Together, we believe that ending the agreement is best for both companies at this point in time," added Hugh Dunleavy, WestJet's executive vice president, planning and strategy in a statement issued this afternoon.

Earlier this month, WestJet entered a deal with Delta Air Lines that Southwest said "could be inconsistent with the agreement presently in place" with Southwest.

Southwest learned through the media that Delta was in talks to divest some of its landing and take-off slots at New York's LaGuardia Airport to WestJet. Southwest, a 2009 entry to the LaGuardia market, hasn't been able to expand at the airport because of the limited number of slots available.

The two airlines signed an agreement in 2008 to begin work on the code-share deal, but progress was slowed last May after a slide in passenger traffic.