Latest round of Alaska-Southwest seesaw battle from San Jose to Mexico goes to ...

Alaska Airlines will begin nonstop service from San Jose to its third Mexican destination next spring with a daily roundtrip flight to the resort city of Puerto Vallarta.

Alaska’s first Puerto Vallarta flight is scheduled for March 19, 2020, pending government approval, and comes about two months after a schedule change announced earlier by rival Southwest Airlines eliminating service from San Jose to five cities, including Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on Jan. 6, 2020.

San Jose will become Alaska’s fourth U.S. gateway into Puerto Vallarta after its existing nonstops from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The airline has not yet responded to requests for comment. It ranks second to Southwest in the number of passengers carried annually at Mineta San Jose International Airport.

When Southwest made its cutback announcement last month, it described the dropped cities — which also include Orlando, El Paso, New Orleans and Baltimore — as “seasonal” service suspensions. Southwest also chopped flights from Oakland to Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta.

At the end of this service reshuffling between San Jose and its most heavily traveled international destination, Mexico, Southwest will no longer be in the San Jose-Mexico market while Alaska will have expanded its number of Mexican destinations from Cabo and Guadalajara to three.

However, the leader in terms of number of destinations, will be the Mexican low-cost carrier Volaris, which flies nonstop between San Jose and Guadalajara, León, Morelia and Zacatecas.

Though these six markets are in one country, they fall into two categories. The U.S. carriers did and will be serving primarily U.S. vacation travelers to and from coastal resort destinations. Volaris’ travelers are primarily “friends and family” travelers flying between U.S. and inland Mexico residences. The only destination in common between the U.S. and Mexican airlines is the major city of Guadalajara, with a population of 1.5 million, about 200 miles inland from Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast.

A spokesman for Southwest declined to answer questions last month about whether the grounding of all Boeing 737 Max aircraft played a role in the airline’s service cutbacks in the Bay Area. That grounding is still in effect since being announced last March and there are increasing indications that it may continue into next year.

However, Southwest — whose fleet consists solely of various models of the 737 — was the largest U.S. operator of the 737 Max at the time of the grounding, which was caused by two fatal crashes of that model flown by other airlines. Southwest’s order of 737 Maxes was the largest of any airline at the world, consisting of 280 aircraft. Of that order, 249 remain to be delivered, according to the airline blog Simple Flying.

According to the Dallas Business Journal, our sister publication in Southwest’s headquarters city, the carrier was to have had 68 Maxes in its fleet by the end of this year and the grounding has affected its scheduling strategy.

Alaska’s Puerto Vallarta service will be operated with an Airbus A320 aircraft, that manufacturer’s competitor to Boeing’s 737 line. Both planes are twin-jet, single aisle aircraft. The A320 version assigned for San Jose’s flight has 12 first class, 24 premium and 108 main cabin seats.