Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

Pas­sen­gers will have to wait longer for a di­rect sched­uled flight to the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic from Port-of-Spain. Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic-based car­ri­er Ara­jet says it will not op­er­ate any sched­uled flights to T&T in the near fu­ture. In re­sponse to an in­quiry from Guardian Me­dia, an Ara­jet spokesper­son said that the air­line is fo­cused on “strength­en­ing the routes that we al­ready have in the Caribbean and be­ing able to con­nect them with North, Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca. Trinidad and To­ba­go is a des­ti­na­tion that we are eval­u­at­ing but not in the short term.”

In Jan­u­ary, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic’s civ­il avi­a­tion board, Jun­ta de Aviación Civ­il (JAC), grant­ed Ara­jet per­mis­sion to be­gin both sched­uled and un­sched­uled flights to Trinidad from its base at San­to Domin­go’s Las Améri­c­as In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port (SDQ). The JAC, at the time, men­tioned a March 2023 start date how­ev­er Ara­jet nev­er for­mal­ly an­nounced the route. The air­line has since re­vealed that it would fly to sev­er­al new des­ti­na­tions in­clud­ing Cana­da, Ar­genti­na, and Chile us­ing its fleet of Boe­ing 737 MAX 8s.

Tourism Min­is­ter, Ran­dall Mitchell told Guardian Me­dia that the air­line cur­rent­ly has no Air Ser­vices Agree­ment (ASA) in place for sched­uled flights, and as such can on­ly con­duct char­ter flights to T&T. An ASA is a bi­lat­er­al agree­ment to al­low in­ter­na­tion­al com­mer­cial air trans­port ser­vices be­tween sig­na­to­ries. Over the last two years Ara­jet has op­er­at­ed char­ter flights be­tween Port of Spain (POS) and Pun­ta Cana (PUJ).