Portland to San Francisco!

My first weekend trip of 2024 was with a pair of friends to Portland, Oregon.  We picked Portland because it was included in a Southwest sale from LA and (in one direction) from Oakland.  On the way back, however, Southwest didn’t have any good options for me to get back to Oakland, so instead, I flew to San Francisco on Alaska Airlines.  I had wanted to fly to Oakland on Alaska, but that wasn’t feasible either, so here we are. 

Alaska Airlines considers PDX airport as one of its hubs, so flights between PDX and San Francisco are considered hub-to-hub flights and offer an enhanced premium experience compared to a flight of similar length, like San Francisco to Salt Lake City. 

As a hub airport, Alaska has several lounges around the terminal.  First, I came upon an express lounge, which I thought was a good idea for a smaller departure area.

But I was departing from concourse C, which has a “full-size” Alaska lounge.  The setup of the lounge is a bit odd though. Part of it is in what appears to be a temporary pseudo-outdoor space.

The main part of the lounge is in a separate room as one would expect a lounge to be.  When you enter the lounge, immediately to your right is check-in and to your left is the bar.

Then as you continue down, there are tables on the right and a Stumptown coffee station on your left.

Past the Stumptown coffee station is the buffet area.  The food options were relatively standard for Alaska, but they were a bit sparser than ((in SFO)) in my opinion.

Luckily they did have a pancake machine.

Then continuing around the corner was the entrance to the patio-like area.  At first, I was planning to sit in the “patio”, but there were no power plugs and you could very clearly hear the terminal noises.  So I went back inside until my flight.

I had briefly considered trying to get on the flight to Oakland, but it was delayed, and I don’t know how flexible Alaska is with things like that.  So instead, I got on the flight I had actually booked and sat in seat 1C.

Unlike a lot of my intra-California Alaska Airlines flights (and that flight to Oakland), this flight was an actual Alaska Airlines mainline flight. 

This aircraft was a 737-700, but its interior had been refurbished with new seats, and they were comfortable and felt fresh. 

Alaska Airlines is very much a west coast airline, and so its hubs are all very close together.  Usually, the airline only offers a meal service if the flight is longer than 670 miles.  670 is a weird number, so I’d be interested to know if that’s designed to specifically include some important routes or to exclude others.  It looks like to me, for example, that Salt Lake City would be excluded from all the hub flights.

Since this was a shorter than standard meal service flight, fewer meals were offered than ((on my flight from DC)).  Specifically, they just offered the sampler plates—such as the fruit & cheese plate or the protein plate, which is what I ordered.

It tasted exactly like you’d expect it to from the picture.  It was totally fine, but there was nothing special about it: food was put on a plate.  Though I did appreciate that they gave me two small bottles of Irish cream to go with it, haha.

Portland to San Francisco is not a very long flight, but San Francisco Airport had one of its parallel runways closed at the time (and it was supposed to remain closed until the early summer), so we had to go briefly into a holding pattern before flying over Oakland to position correctly for landing.  Swinging out to the ocean and then back over to Oakland did actually add substantial time to this flight since it was pretty short to begin with.

In summary, while I enjoyed this short flight from Portland, I was not particularly impressed by any aspect of it.  The lounge was below expectation, especially when you consider that Alaska is the largest airline at PDX but doesn’t have a dominating presence (2/5).  The seat on the plane was good for a flight this length, but I don’t think the refurbished seat has really changed much of anything (4/5).  The service on the flight was fine as well, but there really wasn’t much to speak of (3/5).  The food existed, but it wasn’t really substantial enough or exciting enough to really make any difference to me being offered it or not (3/5). The IFE on this flight was standard for Alaska, where we had personal device streaming and power plugs (3/5).  So overall, this flight gets a 15/25.

I booked this flight through Chase’s travel portal, which is a rare occurrence for me.  My Chase Sapphire Reserve card lets me redeem Chase Ultimate Rewards at a rate of 1.5 ¢/pt, but if you need to make any changes, the travel team is awful to deal with.  However, I was sufficiently confident that this trip would not change, so I went ahead and used the points.  I redeemed around 11 000 Chase points for the flight, but doing it this way meant that it still counted as a revenue flight from Alaska Airlines’ perspective, so I still earned 40 Tier Points and 688 Avios on British Airways.