Ja­maica's Min­is­ter of Trans­port and Works, Michael Hen­ry, said he has had dis­cus­sions with the Min­is­ters of Trans­port for Bar­ba­dos and T&T and fur­ther talks will be held next month. "We are al­so sched­uled for a meet­ing in Oc­to­ber where we can be­gin, as Min­is­ters of Trans­port, to dis­cuss the de­vel­op­ment of an in­te­grat­ed air trav­el for the Caribbean and to make it more eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able, more speed­i­ly at­tain­able and that we will de­vel­op bet­ter in­ter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty," he stat­ed. Hen­ry was speak­ing at a sem­i­nar on Air Trav­el in the Caribbean: Chal­lenges and Op­por­tu­ni­ties, held on Sep­tem­ber 29, on the Mona cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI). Oth­er speak­ers at the sem­i­nar, host­ed by the UWI's Cen­tre for Tourism and Pol­i­cy Re­search, in­clud­ed: Di­rec­tor Gen­er­al, Ja­maica Civ­il Avi­a­tion Au­thor­i­ty, Lt Colonel Os­car Der­by and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, RED­jet Air­lines, Ian Burns.

Turn­ing to op­tions avail­able to en­sure the Caribbean ben­e­fits glob­al­ly from air trav­el, he men­tioned the cre­ation of re­gion­al hubs, and adopt­ing a struc­tured open skies pol­i­cy. "We have to plan well ahead, we have to look at hubs, we have to analyse the costs. We have to recog­nise all the is­sues that re­late to air trans­port... We have to ful­ly ap­pre­ci­ate that there will be many coun­tries in the re­gion that could not ben­e­fit from the larg­er de­vel­op­ment of the air-nau­ti­cal in­dus­try and there­fore, we must be­gin to re­gion­alise hubs and have those hubs cre­at­ed that we can fly more quick­ly be­tween each coun­try," he added.

Ja­maica In­for­ma­tion Ser­vice