The success of Alaska Airlines’ takeover of Hawaiian hinges on this crucial IT system

Neither government shutdown nor IT outage can stop the merger of Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines.

On Oct. 15, Seattle-based Alaska achieved one of the first major tech milestones of the combination. All new bookings made after that day for travel on either airline took place on Alaska’s reservations system, or “passenger service system” (PSS) in airline parlance. And all existing bookings at Hawaiian after April 22, 2026 were moved over to the platform.

This is what Charu Jain, senior vice president of merchandising and innovation at Alaska who is overseeing the guest-facing technology integration of Hawaiian, calls the “selling cutover.” 

The idea is that the reservations in Hawaiian’s PSS will “drain” out of the system until none are left by the night of April 21, 2026. Alaska will then turn off the Hawaiian system and the combined airline will run entirely on one platform.

Simple, right? Not at all.

“PSS is the heart of the airline,” says Jain. “Everything guest-facing is connected to the PSS systems.”

That customer centrality is why getting the PSS cutover right is so important for Alaska, especially as it aspires to become a global competitor to the big U.S. carriers — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines.

Alaska’s $1.9-billion takeover of Hawaiian is premised on the idea that a larger, more expansive airline is a stronger competitor. In its case to regulators, Alaska executives promised more growth and competition as a single larger airline than as two smaller carriers.

Federal regulators agreed and signed off on the deal in September 2024 after Alaska committed to certain consumer protections. They include guaranteed free-family seating, not blocking new competitors at the Honolulu airport, and continuing to serve rural small communities in both the state of Alaska and Hawaii.

These commitments have not slowed Alaska’s integration of Hawaiian. In addition to the selling cutover, the carriers secured a single operating certificate that allows them to fly as one, rather than two, airlines at the end of October. And, in August, they launched a new, combined loyalty program, Atmos.

Still, the full PSS cutover in April remains one of the most challenging technical feats of any airline merger.

“If any portion of the PSS cutover does not go well, it could screw up reservations for hundreds to many thousands of people,” says Henry Harteveldt, aviation analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group. “The presence of risk is omnipresent to cutovers.” 

Every byte of data, from travelers’ personal details to whether or not they paid for or are entitled to a checked bag, must move from one platform to another. For Alaska and Hawaiian, that means moving the latter from a platform powered by travel tech company Amadeus to one run by competitor Sabre.

One only has to look back to March 2012 when United Airlines cutover to Continental Airlines’s PSS system for an example of what can go wrong. Travelers faced issues checking in for flights that resulted in long queues, lengthy call center holds and some flight delays that hit its reputation for years after.

“We want this to be something [travelers are] not anxious about,” says Jain. “We want it to be a non-event.”

The stakes for Alaska are even higher today than they were a month ago after two tech-related disruptions. On Oct. 23, an “IT outage” forced the airline to cancel more than 400 flights and then, on Oct. 29, a global outage of the Microsoft Azure system affected both the Alaska and Hawaiian websites.

The airline has engaged Accenture to conduct a “full top-to-bottom audit of technology” to avoid future IT-related disruptions.

Jain says Alaska is already implementing recommendations from the audit that is expected to wrap in a few weeks time.

Savanthi Syth, an airline analyst at Raymond James who has observed several airline mergers including Alaska’s combination with Virgin America in 2016, says the October issues should not affect the PSS cutover.

“They are using a well-established practice of drawing down bookings on the Hawaiian system,” she says. “This means there will be very few if any bookings left on the Hawaiian system when the cutover happens, minimizing disruptions.”

There is a very good reason to believe Alaska can pull this off without a hitch: It has done it before, successfully using the drain-down approach to the PSS cutover with Virgin America.

Amy Burr, the CEO of Sky VC who led the integration of Virgin America into Alaska at the former before leaving the airline in 2018, says draining down reservations in the smaller airline’s PSS “dramatically derisks the cutover.”

The Virgin America combination provided Alaska with the “muscle memory” to execute future mergers like with Hawaiian, she adds, noting that she is not involved in the current process.

Ben Minicucci, CEO of Alaska, told investors last December that one reason they were confident in their ability to carry off a smooth merger was because “the majority of people who executed the Virgin American integration are [still] here.”

Alaska is still not taking any chances.

The airline plans a number of table-top trials of the cutover before April to make sure it has worked out all of the details, says Jain. At least one “mock flight” is planned for testers to do everything from check-in to boarding and finding their seat using the combined platform to ensure everything goes smoothly. And, Alaska will reduce its schedule on April 21 and 22 — a Tuesday and Wednesday — to reduce possible strain on the system.

Alaska will also set up a command center in Honolulu — Hawaiian’s largest base — to oversee the cutover.

The process, so far, appears to be going smoothly with no notable hiccups during the selling cutover or move to a single certificate.

“For us, the biggest honor, the biggest compliment we can get is silence,” says Rodrigo Ramos, the regional general manager of North America at Sabre.

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