During the upcoming summer season, Delta plans on increasing flights to leisure destinations in Alaska and even announced bolstering of its services to Anchorage with upgraded service from Atlanta, along with new flights from Salt Lake City to Fairbanks. But, that doesn’t mean the entire state is going in that positive direction, with the airline actually ending two of the five cities it serves in the state.
Delta used to be a partner with Alaska Airlines and fed much of its network into and out of Seattle with the small “hub” it acquired from Northwest in 2008. Then the carrier started adding flights from Seattle to leisure destinations including the state capital of Juneau in the summer of 2014, and Alaska Airlines started adding more flights in key Delta hubs.
In the winter of 2014, Delta announced a long list of new flights from what they then officially called a hub in Seattle. Three of these cities were in Alaska: Fairbanks, Ketchikan, and Sitka, and the airline now served the five most populated cities in the state. By the summer of 2015, Delta flew to at least 30 destinations from its new hub in Seattle.
Eventually, Alaska and Delta ended their partnership and are now tough competitors in the now very congested Seattle Tacoma airport. The Anchorage and Fairbanks service with Delta has continued to be year-round.
The airline’s service to the state capital of Juneau has constantly been altered and adjusted with flights going from seasonal on a Boeing 757 when it first began in 2014, to year-round with winter flights being onboard the Embraer E175, and then going back to seasonal, this time with the Boeing 737-800.
Up until this point, the seasonal flights that Delta has operated to Sitka and Ketchikan, have held on and continued to operate, except for a brief hiatus during the pandemic, but it looks like that will be changing and the cities will be disappearing from the airline’s route map.
Delta has removed both Sitka and Ketchikan from its booking platform and published Cirium Diio schedule as of Saturday. The seasonal service to both cities from Seattle was supposed to resume in June 2025, with it continuing until September. Delta flights to Sitka and Ketchikan originally started on the SkyWest CRJ-700s when they began in 2015, and then eventually switched to the Embraer E175 still being operated by the regional airline.
Strong Competition
When Delta started service to the cities, residents were rejoicing that the new airline would bring a very welcome dose of competition to the airport. In an article from 2014, the community used Juneau as an example as it started a summer before Delta’s Ketchikan and Sitka service, where they saw round-trip airfare from Juneau to Seattle dropping from $574 with only Alaska Airlines service, to just $250 on Delta during the times of the year when they serviced the airport.
According to a Delta news release from 2014 that was quoted in the article by Anchorage Daily News, “While fares were not announced [for Ketchikan and Sitka], it’s pretty obvious there’s nowhere for them to go but down,” and refers to the cost of flights to the cities, as they had not yet been put on sale when that article came out.
Alaska Airlines has once again become the only major carrier operating flights to both Sitka and Ketchikan and will return to its year-round monopoly it had prior to 2015 as the only airline providing service from either city to the lower 48 states, as the other airlines that service the airports are small carriers and only fly within Alaska’s southeast panhandle. Both cities see nonstop flights to Seattle, with northbound service to Anchorage being part of the airline’s famous Milk Run, which makes stops in other cities in the state.
