Chester Sam­bra­no

Lead Ed­i­tor–News­gath­er­ing

chester.sam­bra­no@guardian.co.tt

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has an­nounced that state-owned Caribbean Air­lines Ltd (CAL) plans to lease 12 new pas­sen­ger air­craft to deal with in­creas­ing de­mand.

In his 2024 Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion , Im­bert said fol­low­ing the ex­it of LI­AT, the Caribbean has been ex­hibit­ing strong air trans­port de­mand.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly, in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­tors are on the rise,” he said.

He said in Ju­ly 2021, since this coun­try re­opened its in­ter­na­tion­al bor­ders, in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­tors have been in­creas­ing, with ar­rivals reach­ing 226,483 in 2022, re­vi­tal­is­ing the tourism sec­tor. “This buoy­ant trend con­tin­ued in­to 2023, with vis­i­tor ar­rivals for Jan­u­ary-Ju­ly 2023 record­ing 182,508.”

With that in mind, the min­is­ter said as mar­kets pro­gres­sive­ly re­cov­er, Caribbean Air­lines aims to utilise its as­sets ef­fec­tive­ly and es­tab­lish a foun­da­tion for net­work growth.

“The air­line thus in­tends to ex­pand its fleet to meet this grow­ing de­mand through the lease of four ad­di­tion­al ATRs and three ad­di­tion­al B 737-8s, bring­ing the fleet size to a pre-pan­dem­ic lev­el. CAL al­so plans to lease five Em­braer E-175 re­gion­al jets to ser­vice the in­tra-re­gion­al de­mand and to es­tab­lish bases and hubs across the re­gion to pro­mote ef­fi­cien­cy and cost-re­duc­ing mea­sures,” he re­vealed.

In April of this year, CAL’s Amer­i­can law firm, Con­don & Forsyth LLP, ap­plied to the US De­part­ment of Trans­porta­tion “to op­er­ate to the full ex­tent au­tho­rised by the Air Trans­port Agree­ment be­tween the Gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca and the Gov­ern­ment of the Re­pub­lic of T&T”.

In an op­er­a­tional fore­cast, CAL made spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence to Puer­to Ri­co and St Thomas in the US Vir­gin Is­lands as new routes.

The air­line pro­ject­ed rapid growth for these new US des­ti­na­tions.

An op­er­a­tional fore­cast in the ap­pli­ca­tion pro­ject­ed CAL trans­port­ing 5,339 pas­sen­gers to and from Puer­to Ri­co and earn­ing US$694,228 in rev­enue in 2023 with the air­line ex­pect­ing the Puer­to Ri­co route to quadru­ple in 2024 with 21,356 pas­sen­gers and rev­enues of US$2,776,280.

Pas­sen­ger trav­el aside, Im­bert al­so dis­closed that CAL is pur­su­ing car­go op­er­a­tions as an es­sen­tial rev­enue source and is leas­ing 2 ATRs and 2 B 737-800s air­craft to grow and ex­pand its car­go ser­vices across the re­gion.

In 2019, CAL un­veiled a new car­go loy­al­ty pro­gramme and cus­tomers en­rolled in the pro­gramme can earn miles every time they ship with CAL’s car­go ser­vices.