LIAT Scraps Nevis Flights

WINN FM asked Greg Phillip, the Chief Executive Officer of the Nevis Tourism Authority, what reasons LIAT has given this time around for pulling out.

“The reason basically is the performance of the flights, so it’s the load factor for them that they said it’s not working. That being the case of course they’re going to make a decision, it’s a business, so they’ll make a decision to leave. We don’t anticipate that we’ll actually have a lapse of service between Nevis and Antigua and the reason why I say that is because the service that LIAT was providing to Nevis was really provided by, it was a LIAT flight, but it was provided by CHL (Caribbean Helicopters) which is a company out of Antigua who in fact we did have a relationship in the past.”

WINN FM asked how much will the flights on the weekends from Caribbean Helicopters make up for the absence of LIAT?

“I think it will mainly for this reason, we had a contract with them before for them to provide service between Nevis and Antigua and that was before LIAT came on the scene and we were building a good momentum, the loads on the flights were increasing and after LIAT came on board we made adjustments to the schedule etc. So now we are back with CHL providing that service with CHL we can essentially set the schedules in the way that we know will actually service Nevis and have schedules that will truly fit what we are looking for on Nevis because we know what the traffic is like and when people would want to move between Nevis and Antigua and vice versa.”

WINN FM also asked what about those persons who would want to travel to back and forth during the week?

“For us it’s a matter of building, once we begin we are going to start those few days, and we’ll eventually see where the need is and make adjustments accordingly. It’s not that it’s impossible to get to Antigua during the week if you want to travel, there’s obviously the St Kitts airport and the reality is yes, we have the Nevis airport and we promote the Nevis airport for use, but at the same time we really can’t ignore the fact that there’s an airport on St Kitts that also provides access to other places that you can’t necessarily get through on Nevis.”

Source: WINN FM (St. Kitts & Nevis)