Hawaiian vs. Alaska Airlines: A Shocking Customer Service Showdown You Won't Believe

In the past week, we contacted customer service at the two major airlines now tied to Hawaii: one headquartered in Seattle and the one currently still headquartered in Honolulu. And despite what the usual online chatter might suggest, our experience with each could not have been more different or unexpected.

Alaska Airlines is known for its U.S.-based customer support. On the other hand, Hawaiian Airlines routes its customer service calls through a Philippines-based call center and has for years.

The assumption, especially from Hawaii loyalists (including us), is that Alaska will 'fix' Hawaiian’s offshore system once the merger is complete. But they might want to rethink that plan based on what just happened to us.

Hawaiian Airlines: fast, offshore, and surprisingly effective.

Hawaiian Airlines emailed us about a change to one of our upcoming flights in a multi-flight itinerary. The message didn’t say enough, and since this was a two-leg journey, we wanted to be sure all reservations were intact, especially because our editors had booked a separate itinerary.

We called. Ten seconds later, someone answered.

The representative was based in the Philippines. She was calm, clear, knowledgeable, and knew how to locate the other reservations by name and date of travel. She walked us through the change, confirmed everything on all the records, and ensured it was documented. The entire exchange took about five minutes from beginning to end. Easy!

Given Hawaiian’s long-criticized call center setup, we had expected a mess. What we got was professionalism and speed. It wasn’t just good—honestly, it was excellent.

Alaska Airlines: long waits, unresolved issues, no follow-up.

Not long before the Hawaiian call, we had dealt with Alaska Airlines for a separate issue. They had changed one of our flights on an related itinerary, and the email we received didn’t clearly explain things.

As MVP Gold members, we expected the quick, friendly, and effective support we’d become used to. Instead, we got a callback estimate of more than two hours, even though the system claimed nobody had waited longer than an hour. In the end, however, the phone rang long after we’d already given up and figured things out on our own. That call came more than two hours later. We assumed that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.

Another problem came up, this time involving the Alaska app itself. One of our flight bookings wouldn’t load automatically, and attempts to add it manually repeatedly failed. Since the reservation wasn’t appearing, we couldn’t check in through the app or access mobile boarding passes. Not wanting to wait on hold again, we chose the chat option that was offered instead.

That took about ten minutes—longer than expected for something Alaska had positioned as immediate instead of waiting for a callback. When the chat finally connected, it was with someone in Boise. But what followed felt more disconnected than any overseas call center we’ve dealt with in years. The agent repeatedly disappeared for long stretches without explanation. There was no indicator that anything was happening. At several points, we wondered whether they’d closed the session altogether.

The integration gap is widening.

Alaska and Hawaiian continue to tell travelers that integration is coming soon. But at the moment, things like this remain murky. While they wait, customers are falling through the cracks.

When a support system works, you notice. When it doesn’t, you’re stuck refreshing pages, reinstalling apps, calling and chatting again, or walking into an airport, uncertain about your reservation. That’s what we see now: two airlines in a state of overlap without alignment.

And based on our experience, there is not yet a consistent support model.

What actually matters in airline customer service.

Airlines love to promote the idea that U.S.-based agents provide better service. But our experience, even to our surprise, didn’t support that this time.

We had long assumed that Hawaiian’s offshore call center would be inferior, and that Alaska’s stateside model would be reliable. That assumption didn’t hold up. In this case, the offshore rep answered immediately, knew what to do, and resolved the issue completely.

Despite its elite status and two separate attempts, the Alaska team delivered slow, partial, and ultimately ineffective responses.

This isn’t about outsourcing. It’s about getting basic results from airline customer service.