According to the Delta website, the Delta – Midwest Airlines partnership “[t]erminates June 7, 2010.”
I haven’t found any press release, or mention of this on the Midwest Airlines website. But naturally there is a thread on Flyertalk.
Midwest partners in addition to Delta were KLM, Frontier (as they’re jointly owned by Republic), and Amtrak.
Delta’s departure, as poor as their award availability is, leaves a real hole. And redeeming on Midwest isn’t great either, the program even still has blackout dates.
In the past the airline has had several frequent flyer relationships, including American, Virgin Atlantic, and Scandinavian. But those days appear gone.
While the program wasn’t all that appealing in the first place to me, I’d probably just credit Midwest miles to Frontier at this point. At least they partner with Airtran!
Any Midwest advocates out there disagree? Hit the comments with your explanation.
The program never was an appealing one, but Midwest always had suprisingly great service and decent enough seats. First Class upgrades generally could be bought at the gate for fairly cheap prices too. It was great that they partnered with NW (DL) and I used to enjoy flying them.
Maybe they’ll go the Star Alliance route as CO did when they seperated from DL/NW and ST – that’d make me very happy!
Not going to happen, far to big a competitor with United at Denver (with Frontier) and at this point you really have to look at Frontier and Midwest as one airline.
I think Midwest partnered with Delta when it was rapidly shrinking its network and needed a way to keep share – enter Delta. But now with the full codeshare with F9 the YX network got a huge boost, not to mention the restoration of service on some cut YX routes. And from a financial perspective it most likely makes a lot more sense to keep everything in-house. Yes the two airlines codeshare but as Nate puts it one has to consider them to be a single carrier.
Actually, I believe the reason YX was partnered with Delta dated back to the attempted takeover of YX by AirTran. Northwest stepped in and made an investment in YX and partnering arrangements were made with Northwest. Then, when Delta and Northwest merged, the partner agreement continued under the Delta umbrella. However, when Republic took over YX, I believe its stock purchase included the stake that was originally purchased by Northwest and subsequently held by Delta as a result of the merge. Since Delta no longer holds a stake in YX, Delta apparently no longer felt a need for the partner arrangement, and it accordingly disappears.
Why doesn’t Republic just combine the brands now? Is there that much loyalty out there for Midwest vs Frontier?