Asha Javeed

Howard Hall, the for­mer gen­er­al man­ag­er of Air Ja­maica, has re­signed af­ter sev­en months at the air­line, which was tak­en over by Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) last year. He has been re­placed by William Rodgers, CAL said in a state­ment yes­ter­day. Rodgers had pre­vi­ous­ly served as act­ing pres­i­dent and chief ex­ec­u­tive of Air Ja­maica in late 2007. In an in­ter­view with RJR News in Ja­maica, Hall said he was giv­en spe­cif­ic du­ties to be car­ried out dur­ing the tran­si­tion pe­ri­od and now that the tasks were com­plet­ed, he felt it was time to move on. "First of all I was un­der the im­pres­sion that I was to come to Air Ja­maica to deal with the di­vest­ment and the tran­si­tion. That job is pret­ty much fin­ished now and it's time for me to move on," Hall told RJR News yes­ter­day.

Hall said he end­ed his tour of du­ty on good terms with CAL.CAL marked it's takeover of Air Ja­maica three weeks ago and chose to re­tain the the air­line's brand. CAL's state­ment said while the board ac­cept­ed Hall's res­ig­na­tion, the board has con­duct­ed au­dits of the AJ op­er­a­tion and ex­pect­ed bet­ter re­sults in cus­tomer care and prof­itabil­i­ty in that or­der. "We need to pro­vide strong lead­er­ship in or­der to build trust be­tween our em­ploy­ees and the trav­el­ling pub­lic since we know they have a choice in air trav­el. Our long-term strat­e­gy is to have two brands, one Caribbean air­line, and our fo­cus is al­so on cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence.

"Our ex­ec­u­tive man­age­ment team draws from the best from both com­pa­nies, and this will be a dis­tinct ad­van­tage as we move to­wards our ex­pan­sion plans and, more specif­i­cal­ly, mov­ing the Air Ja­maica brand to its for­mer glo­ry," said CAL chair­man, George Nicholas. He con­tin­ued: "Mr Rodgers, our Act­ing Gen­er­al Man­ag­er has had a long and dis­tin­guished ca­reer at Air Ja­maica and is cur­rent­ly in charge of sales for the air­line. We be­lieve in the re­solve of our staff to make our am­bi­tious plans a re­al­i­ty."

Nicholas added: "We need all of our teams func­tion­ing as one with the pur­pose to be the best in the Caribbean, and I look for­ward to the Ja­maica team be­ing in the top five among our sta­tion rank­ings this year.

"The air­line is as good as its em­ploy­ees and it is on­ly through their ef­forts will we make this air­line a glob­al suc­cess." Hall, is the sec­ond chief ex­ec­u­tive to ex­it dur­ing the three-month tenure of Nicholas.

Two weeks af­ter Nicholas as­sumed his chair­man­ship of the na­tion­al car­ri­er, he fired for­mer CAL chief ex­ec­u­tive Cap­tain Ian Brun­ton over a dis­agree­ment about the state-owned air­line's de­ci­sion to pur­chase nine ATR tur­bo­prop air­craft.