The last Virgin America service touched down this week in San Francisco, capping a decade of service that began with Richard Branson’s vision of creating a new North American brand, and ended with the airline’s sale to Alaska Airlines.
Business Insider reports that Alaska Airlines has now fully subsumed Virgin America’s operations under its own brand. Some aircraft will continue to fly with Virgin livery and interiors until they can be repainted and refitted, but all reservations will now be made via Alaska Airlines and Virgin check-in and gates will be replaced by Alaska Airlines.
“The two airlines have come together and we have a single set of flight numbers with one schedule we are operating,” said Alaska Airlines managing director of process engineering Sandy Stelling. “Which means all of the passengers’ reservations and tickets are in a single system.”
Alaska started selling tickets for Virgin flights on its own website last year, rather than attempting to merge the two reservation systems.
Alaska Airlines purchased Virgin Atlantic in 2016 for $2.6 billion. Branson has expressed disappointment that the Virgin brand is vanishing from the US.
