Brent Pin­heiro 

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt 

Al­most one year af­ter re­ceiv­ing per­mis­sion to op­er­ate flights to San Juan, Puer­to Ri­co, state-owned car­ri­er Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) is set to launch 3x week­ly flights from Ju­ly 14th, 2024. Pend­ing reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval from the Trinidad & To­ba­go Civ­il Avi­a­tion Au­thor­i­ty (TTCAA) and the Gov­ern­ment of Bar­ba­dos, CAL plans to fly via Bar­ba­dos on Tues­days, Fri­days and Sun­days. The re­turn flights op­er­ate on Mon­days, Wednes­days, and Sat­ur­days. Flights will be op­er­at­ed by Caribbean Air­lines’ ATR 72-600s with 68-72 econ­o­my class seats and tick­ets go on sale on May 2nd and prices start at US$192 from Trinidad. 

CAL first ap­plied to the U.S. De­part­ment of Trans­porta­tion (DOT) for per­mis­sion to fly to Puer­to Ri­co back in 2020. At the time, the air­line planned to op­er­ate so-called “milk run” flights, stop­ping in sev­er­al East­ern Caribbean coun­tries on the way to Puer­to Ri­co. Milk run flights are flights that stop in sev­er­al places while on the way to their fi­nal des­ti­na­tions. How­ev­er, the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic shut­tered plans as T&T’s bor­ders re­mained closed for an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od.  

CAL again ap­plied to DOT in 2023 for per­mis­sion to op­er­ate the POS-SJU route – an op­er­a­tional fore­cast in the 2023 ap­pli­ca­tion pro­ject­ed that CAL would trans­port 5,339 pas­sen­gers to and from Puer­to Ri­co with that num­ber qua­dru­pling to 21,356 pas­sen­gers in 2024. It was grant­ed a for­eign air car­ri­er per­mit on Sep­tem­ber 21st, 2023 but nev­er launched flights, in­stead fo­cus­ing on build­ing out its East­ern Caribbean ser­vices in a bid to fill the void left by LI­AT (1974).  

Com­ment­ing on the news, Caribbean Air­lines’ CEO Garvin Med­era said “We are ex­cit­ed to ex­pand our pas­sen­ger and car­go ser­vices to San Juan, Puer­to Ri­co, as part of our on­go­ing ef­fort to bet­ter con­nect the Caribbean. This move is cru­cial to our growth strat­e­gy and rep­re­sents our com­mit­ment to of­fer­ing our cus­tomers con­ve­nient and re­li­able trav­el and trade op­tions." 

This would be the 5th US des­ti­na­tion for Caribbean Air­lines, the oth­ers be­ing Mi­a­mi, Fort Laud­erdale, Or­lan­do, and New York. CAL will not be alone on the route though, Amer­i­can ul­tra-low-cost car­ri­er Fron­tier Air­lines re­cent­ly an­nounced its in­ten­tion to pro­vide ser­vice be­tween Puer­to Ri­co and Bar­ba­dos from Ju­ly 3rd. Fron­tier plans to op­er­ate 3x week­ly us­ing its Air­bus A320s.