All in the Alaska-Hawaiian Family

Alaska Airlines hopes to pull off something few other airlines have ever done through its merger with Hawaiian Airlines: successfully fly as a dual-brand carrier.

Flights that touch Hawaiian’s namesake islands will mostly carry the airline’s Pualani brand and those elsewhere will fly with Alaska’s iconic Chester the Eskimo logo. For everything else, it will all be one airline: from the app to the loyalty program and reservations platform. The single-airline-two-brands future begins tonight with the transition to a single reservations system, known as “PSS” to airlines.

Key to that dual-brand strategy is the airport experience. Painting planes is all well and good but it is at the airport where travelers will have their first, and last, experiences with the brands. There, as Hawaiian CEO Diana Birkett Rakow told me in March, the airline wants to ensure travelers know that, no matter what brand they fly, it is all one “ecosystem.”

“There’s very clear parameters based on what brand leads in the market, or whether sort of both brands lead in the market, and there’s very clear parameters to keep the two brands distinct,” Birkett Rakow said. “That guides how we actually execute.”

But it is not one-size fits all approach: most airports will have a “lead” brand, like Hawaiian’s Royal Purple in Hawaii and Alaska’s Midnight Blue in Seattle and most of North America. Certain California markets, like San Francisco International Airport (see above), will feature a balance with a color gradient highlighting both brands.

Following my conversation with Birkett Rakow, I reached out to Alaska to learn more about those clear branding parameters. How will Alaska do this and maintain a coherent customer experience? My mind immediately jumping back to the 1990s airline-within-an-airline experiment where brands like Shuttle by United and Metrojet featured (mostly) snazzy liveries that failed to carry through to a distinct airport design experience.

Yes, the big European airline groups have multiple brands but none attempt a truly dual-brand experience. The closest is probably Air France-KLM that does have joint lobbies for both its brands but, in the images I see, the branding is either Air France, KLM or a neutral background with both logos. Similar but different from what Alaska-Hawaiian is attempting.

To answer my questions, Alaska’s Vice-President of Brand and Marketing Eric Edge jumped on a Teams call with me to chat all things airport branding and design.

The conversation is edited for length and clarity.