One year after returning to Miami International Airport for the first time since 2012 with flights to Seattle, Alaska Airlines has announced that it will launch first-ever service between Miami and a second Pacific Northwest destination: Portland, Oregon.
Alaska Airlines will serve the new East Coast-West Coast route with daily flights year-round beginning November 17, just before the busy Thanksgiving and winter holiday travel season. Last June, Alaska Airlines resumed daily Seattle-Miami flights after a 10-year hiatus, serving the route with Boeing 737-9 aircraft that seat 178 passengers.
The Miami-Portland route news comes one day after American Airlines announced that this winter it will add a second daily flight from MIA to three popular Caribbean destinations: Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago (POS); Santiago, Dominican Republic (STI); and Tortola, British Virgin Islands (EIS). American wasted no time in deciding to expand the Miami-Tortola service, which it just launched on June 1 – making MIA the only U.S. airport to offer nonstop service to the British Virgin Islands for the first time in four decades.
MIA had two other major service announcements in the first half of 2023. On May 31, low-cost carrier Norse Atlantic Airways announced that it will begin its first-ever service from Miami to London (Gatwick) and Oslo and relocate all of its South Florida flights to MIA on September 18. On March 28, Volaris El Salvador – a low-cost subsidiary of Mexican airline Volaris based in San Salvador and a flag carrier for El Salvador – launched three weekly flights between San Salvador and Miami.