Alaska Airlines was once a small regional carrier, but they’ve grown, they acquired Virgin American and now they’ve bought Hawaiian Airlines. They’re going global – taking Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 787s, adding to them, and building a route network out of Seattle to both Europe and Asia.
However, Alaska’s IT systems haven’t kept up with those same global ambitions – because if you go to spend Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards points on their new London to Seattle flight, in conjunction with a connection within Europe on British Airways, they get confused – forgetting they fly from London – and, thinking their own flight is operated by British Airways, they add draconian fuel surcharges to the ticket. They want to charge you nearly $700 – in addition to 150,000 miles – for business class.
Alaska launches London Heathrow terminal 3 service May 21 using a Boeing 787-9 acquired with the Hawaiian Airlines merger, configured with 34 business class seats and 266 coach seats.
- AS100 SEA–LHR: dep 9:40 p.m., arr 3:05 p.m. +1
AS101 LHR–SEA: dep 5:00 p.m., arr 6:45–6:50 p.m.
Alaska did not win its own slots in the initial Summer 2026 coordination round at Heathrow. American Airlines ultimately agreed to lease 14 weekly slots (one daily pair) to Alaska for summer 2026. This trades off with American’s second Miami – London flight.
These 787-9s will be based at Alaska’s new 787 hub in Seattle, eventually planned to total 17 Dreamliners. Alaska will also be flying:
- Tokyo Narita
- Seoul Incheon
- Rome
- Reykjavik (737 MAX)
And they’ve talked up at least 12 long-haul destinations from Seattle by 2030. Hopefully they’ll get the IT figured out before then.
If you book an award for Alaska’s London – Seattle flight but you don’t originate at London Heathrow – if you have a British Airways flight that connects in London to the new Alaska service – then Alaska is pricing this with typical British Airways-style surcharges. This is described as an Alaska Airlines-imposed surcharge.
What makes me assume this is a bug – Alaska just doesn’t know how to handle the fact that it now flies out of Europe! – is that,
- The surcharges don’t appear on flights departing the United States
- And they don’t appear if you originate at London Heathrow
- This only happens if the first segment on the itinerary is British Airways – that makes it ‘look to Alaska like’ this is a BA itinerary that requires surcharges.
Alaska Airlines still hasn’t figured out how to allow more than one airline to be included in most of their awards, even though this has been promised for a couple of years. So it’s progress that British Airways and Alaska can be combined at all. Still, this is part of being a global airline. Your IT systems have to recognize the rules around your own flights!
(HT: Chris)
There’s also problems with advertising pricing which seems half of what the airline is actually charging.
Their flights seem much higher than many other airlines now.
Are you sure at least part of the surcharge isnt really a UK tax that is labeled incorrectly? I know business class flights from LHR to Seattle incur a $300 tax from the UK. LHR departure taxes are based on class of service and distance of flight.
If they’re charging more for their ‘error,’ then I presume it is by-design.
If it’s just bad tech, then, they really should ‘get on that.’ Also, like 2FA is easy to implement, and something they and all airlines really should add for frequent flyer programs.
Oh, and as far as awful tech, a little unrelated, but, Citi, please, for the love of… fix your travel portal. Yikes.
@Daniel- no, because this itinerary originates outside the UK and the connection is under 24 hours, there would be no APD charged. The total charge should be the $191 in taxes/fees that are below the ones highlighted in yellow.
I worked with Alaska IT multiple times as an infosec vendor / consultant. I’ve worked with teams at UA, DL, and AA too.
AS has an odd culture. Very comfortable with where they are. No sense of urgency. They’re aware of competition (like when Delta started focusing on SEA) but they’re very comfortable explaining away problem. There’s a bit of “reality distortion field” around AS HQ.
“Everything is awesome” is the default and nobody wants to stand up and point out the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
Finally there’s an odd priority of new stuff (iPads for gate agents, new phones for flight crew) over fixing ugly bugs in legacy systems.
I got the sense that the inmates (devs) were running the asylum and got to pick the fun stuff (building new things) and avoid the hard stuff (fixing bugs).
So bugs like Gary mentions are very on-brand for AS.
And I thought charging 150K for AA lax-LHR (little fees) was egregious enough.
Easy Fix
Don’t fly on them period. If you don’t like it use your miles somewhere else. Cry baby lol
What Daniel said.
Premium Econ and above has an UK Air Passenger Duty (APD) that is substantially higher than APD for an economy seat. I paid aroubd $290 APD in September for DL Premium Select SEA-LHR. I think APD was roughly $100 for Economy.
So perhaps the fee is not all fuel surcharges.
@Mark- that APD would have only been charged for the LHR-SEA segment, not the SEA-LHR one. And again, only for something which originates from the UK. Since this itinerary began in the Netherlands, no APD would be charged.
Ex-UA Plat. “I worked with Alaska IT multiple times as an infosec vendor / consultant. I’ve worked with teams at UA, DL, and AA too.”
Can you offer insights into the other carriers and their IT acumen and/or cultures?
Yeah we tend to fly Delta more out of SEA bc Alaska is always more expensive now their pricing doesn’t make sense.. they say it’s the total but only at checkout you realize it’s the total per passenger while at other airlines it’s the total you see for the entire group, quit deceptive from Alaska really.
Gotta pay for those leased slots somehow!
Gary, if you haven’t already, you should check out the Flyertalk threads on the IT frustrations as well as the shortcomings with trying to book flights on the AS website. They have to know they are losing money by not fixing a lot of these things.
Piggybacking on what Ex UA Plat said, I think AS leadership leans so much into how much loyalty people have for AS and uses that as an excuse to not fix some of this stuff. Eventually they will exhaust all this goodwill and then scramble when people bail.
AS / HA domestic is a mess
Try flying same day round-trip in Hawaii. (Huge volume flying painters between islands.)
HA was no IT star, but putting AS on top (and every flight has 2 different numbers) is a joke.
“The same team that integrated Virgin?” it’s not working!
Fortunately, SWA flies some inter-island flights.
Yes, their automation is very poor.
Almost never allows you to change a mileage ticket online, doesn’t identify available seats. Just yesterday I wanted to change a ticket and first look at availability. Two seats available PSP LHR, yet agent at Alaska says it wasn’t available. Booked it myself and asked her to retrieve it and she said she’d send a message to their IT department, yet again I was forced to pay their loathsome $12.50 “partner booking fee.”
The agent refunded the fee on the first ticket, but I was assured by their Customer Relations staff years ago that I am allowed to amend mileage bookings ad infinitum (that means until the sun explodes in five billion years).
Sigh.
@JL Can you offer insights into the other carriers and their IT acumen and/or cultures?
UA was obscenely cheap. Not frugal (spend money carefully) but cheap (what costs less).
DL teams I worked with were arrogant and cocky. And often just flat out wrong about stuff.
AA was an odd mix of UA’s cheapness with a bit of politics thrown in. More worried about messaging and appearance to “highers” than the actual core issue at hand.
Another huge problem with Alaska IT is the phantom space they show on AA. They blame it on IT issues and say they will fix it but never really seem to make any progress towards that. If there is a will there is a way, but they seem to have no will.
I emailed their VP Loyalty Brett Catlin about it and he responded:
“Thanks for your note. We’re actively working to improve how and when we notify guests about partner award availability, specifically, surfacing inventory issues earlier in the booking flow rather than at checkout.
This challenge isn’t unique to Alaska, but we know it creates confusion and frustration. Providing early notifications of discrepancies is a priority, and we’re activity making changes to reduce the disconnect and improve visibility.”
This is, of course, great corporate-speak for “we’re aware about it but not going to do anything because it actually benefits us to sell hundreds of millions of Atmos points through credit card deals and then make it impossible for people to use those points on our biggest partners.”
It’s literally a scam what they’re doing, but nobody calls them out on it.
I was a loyal AK airlines reward member but Atmos Rewards is just not working for me.
If anyone cares I am cancelling my AK credit card. My loyalty went away when Atmos took over.
Does the market really need another carrier doing SEA-LHR ?… Waste of resources.
AS should be building up HNL as a transpacific hub instead. And deploy any surplus widebodies domestically to gain an edge against the single-aisle ops of other carriers.