Long Beach Airport gets more routes as competition heats up

When Long Beach officials gave Southwest Airlines access to Long Beach Airport for the first time this year, experts predicted heated head-to-head competition with the airport’s biggest carrier, JetBlue Airways.

Game on.

Southwest, the nation’s most popular domestic carrier, last month launched four new flights each day from Long Beach to Oakland, serving the state’s most popular market, routes between Southern California and the Bay Area.

But Southwest didn’t stop there. It persuaded the city of Long Beach to temporarily allocate three daily slots to Southwest that weren’t being used by JetBlue. Long Beach allows 50 daily slots for large jets. Southwest said it would use JetBlue’s slots to fly to Las Vegas starting in September.

“We are delighted that Southwest is putting these unused slots to use at the Long Beach Airport,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said in announcing the transfer. “This will attract new customers and bring additional revenue to our airport.”

Meanwhile, JetBlue announced this week that it would add a nonstop flight from Long Beach to San Jose starting in January, and will increase the flight frequency on existing routes to Las Vegas, San Francisco and Salt Lake City starting in November.

But JetBlue said it isn’t adding flights in response to competition from Southwest. Instead, the New York-based carrier said the increase is part of a larger effort to serve the hugely popular West Coast market.

“This is just part of a broader West Coast strategy,” JetBlue spokesman Philip Stewart said.

hugo.martin@latimes.com

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