South Korea’s Air Premia Partners With Southwest for US Access

Air Premia describes itself as a hybrid service carrier, a model that sits between low-cost and full-service airlines: fewer frills and a leaner cost base than a legacy carrier, but a more comfortable product than a typical budget airline, without the network scale of either.

From its Seoul Incheon base, Air Premia currently flies nonstop to just Los Angeles, San Francisco, Newark, Washington Dulles, Honolulu, Tokyo Narita, Hongkong, Da Nang and Bangkok – a compact network that leaves plenty of gaps for partner airlines to fill. Interline deals let a hybrid carrier plug that network gap cheaply, feeding a handful of nonstop routes into a much larger partner network instead of trying to fly everywhere itself.

That’s the strategy behind the Southwest deal, which extends a network of interline agreements Air Premia has been building since 2024, including partnerships with Korean Air, Thai Airways and T’way Air.

Southwest, meanwhile, has been steadily assembling a roster of international interline partners over the past two years.

Air Premia joins a list that includes ANA, China Airlines, Condor, EVA Air, Icelandair, Philippine Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Turkish Airlines – a network that gives Southwest’s largely domestic-focused airline significant exposure in Asia and Europe without adding a single long-haul aircraft to its own fleet.