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Sunday, March 16, 2025

Virgin’s crisis could be Tobago’s opportunity

by

Kyron Regis
1775 days ago
20200506
Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

As Vir­gin At­lantic has an­nounced that it prepar­ing to cut al­most a third of its 10,000-mem­ber work­force and close its Lon­don Gatwick op­er­a­tions to sur­vive the COVID-19 cri­sis, it can have an up­side for To­ba­go.

To­ba­go Tourism Agency (TTA) CEO Louis Lewis told Guardian Me­dia (GML), “If it hap­pens, there’s a whole new strate­gic di­rec­tion for us.”

Vir­gin At­lantic re­cent­ly cau­tioned that it would take up to three years to re­turn to 2019 traf­fic lev­els and an­nounced plans to cut up to 3,150 jobs.

The air­line’s ex­it from Gatwick air­port, where it has been based for the past 35 years, has ma­jor im­pli­ca­tions for To­ba­go since Vir­gin flights came di­rect­ly from Gatwick to To­ba­go.

Lewis told GML, “It may have some plus­es, in the sense that, if it is con­nect­ing out of Man­ches­ter, it al­lows greater con­nec­tiv­i­ty with the rest of Eu­rope. So that could po­ten­tial­ly work in our favour.”

He not­ed that the sit­u­a­tion is one where stake­hold­ers in To­ba­go would have to wait and see how it un­folds. Lewis high­light­ed that Vir­gin At­lantic is cur­rent­ly in talks with the UK gov­ern­ment con­cern­ing fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance and said, “There is that as well as a con­sid­er­a­tion.”

Ac­cord­ing to Lewis, the sit­u­a­tion in­volves a lot of mov­ing parts and it is far from set­tled. He said: “When de­ci­sions are made then we will see how we’ll strate­gize our­selves in­to that frame­work.”

In a re­cent GML re­port, Lewis an­nounced that COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed To­ba­go’s tourism sec­tor, with loss­es pro­ject­ed to be ap­prox­i­mate­ly $88 mil­lion. He al­so said em­ploy­ment would be af­fect­ed, with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,000 peo­ple be­ing dis­lo­cat­ed.

The Min­is­ter of Tourism, Ran­dall Mitchell con­firmed to GML that Vir­gin would nor­mal­ly fly to To­ba­go once per week, with a 226 seat ca­pac­i­ty. He not­ed that in the high (win­ter) sea­son the air­line would fly to To­ba­go twice per week.

He said: “At this time it may be too ear­ly to say whether there will be a ces­sa­tion of flights to To­ba­go.”

How­ev­er, Mitchell said the ques­tion of Air­lift has al­ways been a pri­or­i­ty for the To­ba­go tourism sec­tor, not­ing that the San­dals project was sup­posed to cre­ate the de­mand for air­lift with its world-class brand­ed prop­er­ty.

Mith­cell said that the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has sig­nif­i­cant­ly dis­rupt­ed the world­wide trav­el and tourism in­dus­try. He said: “The pic­ture will be quite dif­fer­ent as we come out on the oth­er side.”

He con­tin­ued to note that many air­lines around the world have ex­pe­ri­enced tur­bu­lence and will have to quick­ly ad­just to the new nor­mal. As with all oth­er tourism sec­tors, Mitchell said that To­ba­go and Trinidad will have to adapt to the new nor­mal to en­sure sur­vival.

The Tourism Min­is­ter added that Ap­ple Leisure and the Sun­wing group are ready to as­sume the man­age­ment of the Mag­dale­na and Tur­tle Beach re­sorts. He said that the com­pa­nies are large, ver­ti­cal­ly in­te­grat­ed firms op­er­at­ing in the tourism sec­tor with the re­quired air­lift and tour op­er­a­tors to en­sure that the ho­tels are full.


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