Nadaleen Singh

Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) does not need a bail out just yet.

That's the de­c­la­ra­tion of its chief ex­ec­u­tive, Michael DiLol­lo. He said the air­line had ben­e­fit­ted from ex­treme­ly pa­tient share­hold­ers for years and be­lieved the air­line was strate­gi­cal­ly po­si­tioned to break even in three years.

In ear­ly Feb­ru­ary, then fi­nance min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai told Par­lia­ment that unau­dit­ed ac­counts for 2014 showed the air­line made a loss of US$60 mil­lion, in­clu­sive of its Air Ja­maica op­er­a­tions, and the air­line planned to break even by 2017.

Howai had al­so told the Par­lia­ment that a five-year strate­gic plan had been com­plet­ed and cur­rent­ly was be­ing ap­proved for im­ple­men­ta­tion.

It out­lined the trans­for­ma­tion of the busi­ness mod­el through re­assess­ment of the prod­uct, in­clud­ing fleet and net­work plan­ning, rev­enue man­age­ment, pric­ing and cus­tomer ser­vice.

Speak­ing yes­ter­day to mem­bers of the me­dia at CAL's Pi­ar­co head­quar­ters, DiLol­lo said:

"When I look at the in­vest­ment that has been af­ford­ed to the air­line and com­pare that with my ex­pe­ri­ence in the pri­vate sec­tor, it is ab­solute­ly as­tound­ing.

'"All of the share­hold­ers, what­ev­er the po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion, have been ex­treme­ly pa­tient and ex­treme­ly com­mit­ted to this air­line over the years.

"I am hum­bled and grate­ful that they (the share­hold­ers) did it. How­ev­er, in the cur­rent con­text we need to do bet­ter. We need to do bet­ter for the share­hold­ers. We need to do bet­ter for the peo­ple of T&T."

Asked whether the air­line planned to seek a bail out, he said: "We are try­ing des­per­ate­ly to min­imise that to ze­ro as quick­ly as we pos­si­bly can but ob­vi­ous­ly re­turn­ing val­ue for share­hold­ers in so­cio-eco­nom­i­cal­ly bal­anced man­ner."

DiLol­lo, a pi­lot, said he was ready to land the air­line in a break-even fi­nan­cial po­si­tion and that the air­line was "well on our way, very well on our way to achiev­ing that tar­get."

Asked what he meant by "well on our way" he said: "We are about 35 to 40 per cent of the way there. There is much work to do. In the next month as all of the ini­tia­tives come in­to play (it would) add con­sid­er­ably to that progress.

He added: "It's a dy­nam­ic en­vi­ron­ment. We have de­ployed 32 trans­for­ma­tion­al projects in the com­pa­ny that are start­ing to yield very pos­i­tive re­sults. We are very hap­py with those re­sults to­day."

While not specif­i­cal­ly stat­ing the need for the tick­et price to in­crease for in­ter- is­land trav­el, he said the price of the tick­et was not at a suit­able rate to at­tract prof­itabil­i­ty.

He said: "The air­bridge at cur­rent tick­et prices which date back to 1992 is not some­thing we can look at in to­day's in­fla­tion­ary re­al­i­ties and say that the T&T (in­ter-is­land) route is a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to CAL.

"It is an es­sen­tial ser­vice that we must take very se­ri­ous­ly and ob­vi­ous­ly would re­quire some fund­ing un­der the cur­rent pric­ing. We just can't make that work un­der the cur­rent pric­ing scheme that ex­ists. The T&T air­bridge ob­vi­ous­ly re­quires some lev­el of as­sis­tance."

Routes

�2 The Lon­don route would be dropped ef­fec­tive­ly on Jan­u­ary 10, 2016.

�2 The de­ci­sion to drop the route comes af­ter the find­ings of two con­sul­tants.

�2 The di­as­po­ra will be well tak­en care of.

�2 Not rul­ing out a code-shar­ing agree­ment with any car­ri­er.

�2 As­sess­ing the risk/re­wards op­tions con­cern­ing pick­ing up the George­town/Ja­maica route. No de­ci­sion made.