An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

Re­port­ing from An­tigua

an­drea.perez-sobers

@guardian.co.tt

In­ter­Caribbean Air­ways CEO Trevor Sadler has con­firmed the air­line will fi­nal­ly be­gin ser­vice to T&T be­tween Oc­to­ber and No­vem­ber.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia at the Caribbean Trav­el Mar­ket­place fo­rum here yes­ter­day, Sadler said the air­line had been hold­ing off on en­try in­to Trinidad be­cause it had to close off a cou­ple of ad­min­is­tra­tive things on their side.

“We’ll be launch­ing ad­di­tion­al air­craft and in turn, be part of the new route struc­ture that’s com­ing this year,” Sadler said.

Asked if there was any chal­lenge re­gard­ing en­try in­to the T&T mar­ket, Sadler said the civ­il avi­a­tion au­thor­i­ty in T&T has no con­cerns.

“We’ve shared in prin­ci­ple what we would like to do. It falls with­in the frame­work of all reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals. So it’s just a mat­ter of now se­lect­ing the time to ad­vance this for­ward,” he out­lined.

In­ter­Caribbean flies to sev­er­al ma­jor Caribbean des­ti­na­tions, in­clud­ing Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica, Cu­ba, Guyana, Haiti, St Vin­cent, Grena­da and Puer­to Ri­co.

It has been plan­ning to add T&T to its list of des­ti­na­tions since last June.

Mean­while, Sadler said for re­gion­al trav­el to grow, there must be a big­ger buy-in from re­gion­al gov­ern­ments who will not charge a re­gion­al trav­eller at the same tax rate as an in­ter­na­tion­al trav­eller.

“Af­ter all, the Caribbean is the home for forty-some­thing mil­lion peo­ple, and as much as we are is­lands apart here, fi­nan­cial­ly get­ting from one to the oth­er is quite a bur­den. ... I would hon­est­ly be­lieve re­gion­al trav­el would see maybe two and a half times the vol­ume we see to­day even if we cut the tax­es by 50 per cent and cre­ate re­gion­al trav­el tax.”

How­ev­er, Sadler added that it’s go­ing to be a bold gov­ern­ment that takes the step to re­duce tax­a­tion.

“Every coun­try has the chance to im­prove. A lot of the re­gion­al trav­el is go­ing to vis­it friends and fam­i­ly, (trav­ellers) may stay in fam­i­ly homes, but they’re go­ing to go out to din­ner, they’re still go­ing to be part of the spend, that spend is not go­ing to be lost.”

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia last year, Sadler said the air­line, which was found­ed in the Turks and Caicos in 1991, pays over US$300 per per­son in tax­es in each of the coun­tries it flies to.