PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said yes­ter­day the Gov­ern­ment is al­so on track to fi­nalise at least 15 air ser­vice agree­ments with var­i­ous gov­ern­ments.

In an in­ter­view at his of­fice, Sinanan said these agree­ments would pave the way for more flights in­to T&T.

He said inter-re­gion­al trav­el will hold a spe­cial fo­cus when T&T hosts the Air­ports Coun­cil In­ter­na­tion­al – Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean’s (ACI-LAC) An­nu­al As­sem­bly Con­fer­ence and Ex­hi­bi­tion next year.

He ad­mit­ted he had been dis­ap­point­ed by the slow progress made with re­gard to im­prov­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty across the re­gion. How­ev­er, in the mean­time, he said work has been done in T&T to help this process through the im­prove­ment of its avi­a­tion ser­vices.

Sinanan said the con­fer­ence, set to be held in Oc­to­ber 2025 could be plat­form for sig­nif­i­cant change, giv­en the num­ber of avi­a­tion de­ci­sion mak­ers who should be in at­ten­dance.

“Now that that we have es­tab­lished that we are host­ing, we are hop­ing to have an en­tire day where dis­cus­sions could take place at a high lev­el, high lev­el, for that in­ter-is­land con­nec­tiv­i­ty,” he said.

“We’re hop­ing that com­ing out of that fo­rum next year, we should have a clear plan of how we can de­vel­op in­ter is­land trav­el, make it a lot eas­i­er, a lot sim­pler and a lot more af­ford­able for the cit­i­zens of the Caribbean.”

Di­rec­tor Gen­er­al of ACI-LAC Rafael Echevarne said T&T does have the base to be­come a trans­port hub to the Caribbean in a sim­i­lar vein to Pana­ma, and adds that the Latin Amer­i­can re­gion is al­so in­ter­est­ed in im­prov­ing re­gion­al trav­el.

“I can tell you that con­nec­tiv­i­ty is one of the top pri­or­i­ties and so in­deed this is a top­ic that re­al­ly gen­er­ates a lot of in­ter­est not just in Trinidad but in every sin­gle is­land. It is ab­solute­ly es­sen­tial for so­cial and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment of the re­gion in gen­er­al but in par­tic­u­lar for the Caribbean is­lands,” he said, point­ing out that this coun­try’s prox­im­i­ty to South Amer­i­ca al­so could be piv­otal.

“There is a very im­por­tant mar­ket that is still un­tapped, which is South Amer­i­ca, and the po­ten­tial is ab­solute­ly hu­mon­gous. I mean, it’s re­al­ly very, very ex­cit­ing times, I think, for trade that and re­al­ly def­i­nite­ly it has the po­ten­tial of be­com­ing a hub, not on­ly for in­tra Caribbean, but al­so for the en­tire con­ti­nent.”

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