AA to Cut Down on Barbados Flights in 2014
Executive Vice President of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) Sue Springer announced AA flight from JFK will cease flying as of January 2014 which is a reduction of seven flights per week.
This comes at a time when long stay arrivals recorded a decrease of approximately 6.3 percent for January to September 2013. This is further compounded with reduced visitor spend.
However, at the Third Quarterly General meeting of the BHTA held yesterday at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, she assured the audience of hoteliers, “the Barbados Tourism Authority (BTA) and the Ministry of Tourism are working assiduously on this airlift issue and they have been throughout the world trying to deal with this issue. I applaud them for it because airlines are struggling and it is not about loyalty anymore it comes down to what is the load factor and are we profitable as an airline. Talks are going on with new airlines and the Minister and team will be at the routes conference next week which is the main conference for all airlines.”
Urban Cumberbatch, Acting President and CEO of the BTA responded to the loss of this major airlift for Barbados, he said “We were aware that American Airlines was going to terminate their service, we were aware of this for the last seven months.”
“Therefore, we have been trying to establish, through [another] carrier to take up the slack, when American Airline close their service. We have not been successful to date.” He added, “We have had meetings with JetBlue, United Airlines and we have spoken to Caribbean Airlines to do a sort of charter. We right now have a plan in place with JetBlue to pick up the slack to some extent. It is something that we consider will not only be detrimental from an airline capacity standpoint but when you look at the New York area it will be impactful on the diaspora as well.”
“So we are not just sitting down and taking this thing lightly, we understand the impact of a service terminating from the New York area...We expect to maybe bring Delta on board. In the past when we look at the Delta out of New York they wanted us to pay $30 million to put on a service for us. The point I am making is that airline service in this age is not cheap and if you look at our budget, one third of our budget goes to maintaining airline capacity into the country. So we understand the importance of it and we are doing the best we can in the present circumstances.”
Source: The Barbados Advocate
