Alaska Airlines fumbles launch of Starlux awards

Starlux is a Taiwan-based airline that was founded in 2018 and began operations in 2020, a tricky time to start a new travel company, to say the least. Despite the poor timing, it has garnered quite positive reviews for both its hard and soft product. This year, Starlux launched its first long-haul route, flying an A350 nonstop between Taipei and LA. It also announced a partnership with Alaska airlines.

At that point, Alaska said that Mileage Plan members would be able to redeem their miles on Starlux by the middle of the summer and that there would be an initial promotional rate of 60K in business and 20K in economy…a great price for an excellent way to get to East/Southest Asia. The downside was that there was no mention of what the post-promotional pricing would be.

On Wednesday, Alaska announced that it was now possible to book Starlux awards online and that the promotional pricing would be available for bookings through August 31st. Looks like they overestimated that timeframe by about 95%, as there are no more 60K business tickets available for the entire schedule, only slightly more than 24 hours after the launch.

An Inauspicious Launch

There’s a lot to be said for Alaska Mileage Plan, but it’s been a frustrating couple of years between no-notice devaluations and a series of new partners that have been added at near-extortionate pricing. The partnership with Starlux was exciting, as it combined an extremely useful route (LA-Taipei), a new product with excellent reviews and the “guarantee” of a period of very appealing pricing.

From the moment that they announced bookable awards, it seemed like something was amiss. I saw that LAX-TPE was pricing out at 60k for business class, as expected, but adding a connecting flight from anywhere else in the US caused the award cost to skyrocket to 130K one-way. This shouldn’t happen with Alaska as saver positioning flights in the US are always included in the international award cost.

When I called Alaska to check on that, and to book a flight, the partner rep wasn’t able to see any awards on her end. She had no idea that they were bookable, no idea what they should cost or why the LAX-TPE route wasn’t pricing correctly with a domestic flight attached. This isn’t to denigrate the partner CSR at all. She obviously knew her way around the partner awards, but Alaska had given the reps no guidance before announcing that awards were live. She was never able to successfully find anything, but I was able to see the space and book the award via the Alaska app.

At the same time, I also saw odd pricing anomalies develop as the day went on. Hanoi-TPE was 15K in business, TPE-LAX was 60K, but adding them together caused the award to reprice all the way up to 130K. I assumed that these were IT kinks that Alaska had to work out and, with the guarantee that promotional pricing would be live for another month, that they would have things trucking by the weekend.

A 30-day promotion lasts 24 hours?

Starting last night, anyone who looked for Starlux space on Alaska was gobsmacked by what they saw. On the one hand, business-class awards were available for almost every day on the schedule. The problem is that there’s not a single 60K seat to be found…and prices have increased to 165K miles…one way. Although there’s some 20K economy seats, many of them have increased to 45K one way:

What makes this even worse is that many folks weren’t able to successfully book via the website due to technical glitches that Alaska was having on Wednesday and Thursday. When I booked my flight, I wasn’t able to get the flights to ticket on the website and was only able to complete it using the app (the CSR couldn’t see any availability). Folks who thought that they had time to try again today are undoubtedly disappointed.

Alaska claims that all of its promotional business award availability has been booked…in less than 24 hours. Given that the whole schedule was open, that’s tough to understand, especially since there were many dates with 4+ seats when I first looked. If inventory was that tight, there’s no way that they should have promised promotional pricing until August 31st. It’s a big miss.

There’s also still some odd pricing going on with connecting flights that makes me think they  have some work to do on the Starlux integration with the booking platform. For instance, here’s the March calendar for Hanoi-Taipei in business (other months look the same):

Drilling down on March 12th, we get this pricing:

It’s only a 2.5 hour flight, but 7.5K in economy and 15K in business seems like very good pricing. If we look at the TPE-LAX flight on the same day, we see the following:

So, buying the two legs separately would cost 27.5K in economy or 180K in business. I would actually expect the total cost booking these two together to be nearly the same as just TPE-LAX based on Alaska’s award chart. But that’s not what we find:

Booking the two legs as one itinerary costs an extra 15K in economy (vs buying each leg separately) or 55K in business. This seem like something funky is happening with Alaska’s booking engine as they try to add saver vs non-saver, promotional pricing, etc. Hopefully, in working out these kinks, we get a second shot at some more moderately-priced options. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.

Quick Thoughts

What a bummer. It’s painful to see how poorly Alaska has managed the launch of the Starlux partnership. My assumption is that it had the best of intentions with the promise of promotional pricing, but either they completely underestimated demand, overestimated what Starlux was going to give them or are doing a complete IT faceplant (or perhaps all three). Regardless, it’s yet another partner launch that’s leaving customers feeling like they’ve been duped.

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