JetBlue Happy with Response to TCI Flights

JetBlue Happy with Response to TCI Flights
By Vivian Tyson (Turks & Caicos Sun)

JetBlue Airways, which is due to begin weekly flights between John F. Kennedy International Airport and the Providenciales Airport, said the level of business and the feedback that it was getting has been encouraging.

Mateo Lleras, JetBlue’s Manager Corporate Communications for Latin America and the Caribbean, who was on the Providenciales recently, meeting with the Turks and Caicos Islands Airports Authority and movers and shakers in the hotel industry, confirmed that.

According to Lleras, while bookings were not overwhelming high, from all indications, the JFK/Providenciales route, in the medium to long term will be among that airline’s raft of success stories.

“We usually give a market to mature between one and three years, so we don’t expect a huge response from the get go, but we have been seen a steady line of booking for the route. Every new route we open a lot of work goes behind it, not only analyzing if the demand is there or operational opportunity, but also looking at the prices, and one of the biggest opportunities we saw is that the airfare is highly priced.

Once we enter a market, we like to stick around it for the long term. There are very few cities in our history where we actually had to take the flight out. Every time we chose a city is because we have a commitment from the authorities, from the tourism board and from all those who are stakeholders. Whether one, two or three years, the market takes sometime to mature and, we are definitely committed to making that work,” Lleras said.

Lleras said from the meetings with the tourism stakeholders, JetBlue was feeling confident that the new alliance will work, since everyone pledged to put in their efforts to make it work.

“We feel we have a lot of support, we are very excited and we are confident that we will make it grow, but definitely we are in it for the long term,” Lleras said.

Lleras said apart from offering “fair fares”, clients should expect to be seated on leather, the most leg room in coach, since the coach space is up to three inches wider that the average airline. He said TV is affixed to the back of each seat with 36 channels of DirecTV, plus free unlimited snacks and drinks. JetBlue’s first flight is February 17 from JFK, while its first Boston flight is February 19.