Eight Caribbean Territories Served by LIAT Are Uneconomical

LIAT will be approaching eight of the territories it services for financial assistance given that these routes are costing the Caribbean airline more than it makes from attending to them.

This was indicated by LIAT chief executive officer, Captain Ian Brunton, as he addressed the recently concluded state of the industry conference hosted by the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) in St Kitts.

“LIAT cannot continue to meet the cost of these social routes,” Brunton told the gathering as he described 35 percent of the airline’s 112 daily flights as “social (uneconomic) routes”.

The airline operates the intra-regional routes in the Caribbean going as far north as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago in the south, also flying into the US and British Virgin Islands and the French Caribbean, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Without saying which markets are uneconomical, Brunton says the routes are in and out of eight countries. “We intend to approach those markets to provide support on the uneconomic routes,” says the former CEO of Caribbean Airlines.

The airline is owned by three of the 11 CARICOM governments -- Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Antigua and Barbuda -- and seven non-CARICOM territories benefit from the service LIAT provides. Those non-CARICOM territories are: United States Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Curacao, Aruba, Guadeloupe and Martinique.