San Diego International Airport.

In the latest air travel news, Southwest is set to expand service at San Diego next summer as a new analysis determines San Diego International is the world’s fastest-growing airport; American Airlines commits to fleetwide installations of Starlink Wi-Fi; Southwest offers customers a new travel planning tool from ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence; American Airlines tells airport staff to end passenger bumpings on oversold flights, begins a new cash-plus-miles option to pay for flights, and starts testing advance reservations for buy-on-board food items; Delta lets passengers check a case of wine for free on flights from five Northern California airports; Southwest Airlines plans a limited number of San Jose-Orlando flights this winter; JetBlue ends LAX-Newark service next week; British Airways is bringing the world’s largest business class to the Airbus A380s it uses on San Francisco-London flights; and Alaska/Hawaiian makes big changes to its Atmos Rewards loyalty program.

Both Southwest and Alaska Airlines are aggressively adding flights at San Diego, and largely as a result of that competition, the Southern California airport has become the fastest-growing in the world, according to an analysis by Simple Flying’s Luke Diaz. He said the number of passenger flights at SAN this year has jumped by 13% over 2025, beating out the 12% growth rate at Vietnam’s Hanoi Airport and at Switzerland’s Zurich Airport, and the 11% increase at Chicago O’Hare. “This intense competition between the top two giants [Southwest and Alaska] is actively crowding out ultra-low-cost budget airlines,” Diaz wrote. “Frontier Airlines cut its flights by 20% because San Diego only has one runway and limited gate space, which drives up operational costs. Meanwhile, the major traditional network airlines like United, Delta, and American are keeping their schedules completely flat.”

Article continues below this ad

A Starlink webpage in September 2024 for United Airlines.

SpaceX’s Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi continues to grab a larger share of the U.S. market. Last spring, American Airlines announced it would install Starlink on a limited part of its fleet — specifically, its 500 single-aisle Airbus planes. But this week, the airline said it is going all in with Starlink, expanding the company’s low-Earth-orbit satellite Wi-Fi to its entire fleet of 1,030 aircraft, including 400 Boeing single-aisle and 130 Boeing wide-body planes in addition to Airbus equipment. Other U.S. airlines that are going with Starlink include United, Alaska/Hawaiian, Southwest and Frontier, while Delta and JetBlue have committed to the new Amazon Leo satellite Wi-Fi network, even though it is not yet in operation. American said it will begin installations early next year but didn’t estimate how long a fleetwide rollout would take. 

Delta archrival United already has Starlink on hundreds of regional jets, and View From the Wing reported this week that the airline is speeding up installations on its mainline fleet to 20 a week, with the expectation of having it on more than 1,000 of those larger aircraft by May of next year. View From the Wing’s Gary Leff noted that United is currently using its Starlink technology to lure frequent flyers away from Delta and American with an elite status match promotion through Oct. 15 headlined “Don’t keep buffering: Switch to United and get the fastest Wi-Fi in the sky.” As fast, reliable Wi-Fi becomes increasingly important to travelers in their airline preferences, Delta is at a real disadvantage as it falls behind its competitors in that........

© SFGate