Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) flight BW 903 de­part­ed Lon­don Gatwick on Mon­day at 11.50 am.(GMT) and rrived at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al to a wa­ter salute at 5.33 pm (lo­cal). There were 181 pas­sen­gers and crew on board.

In re­sponse to ques­tions from the T&T Guardian, CAL is­sued a state­ment ex­plain­ing that the de­ci­sion to dis­con­tin­ue ser­vice to Lon­don was not an easy one, since the air­line's cus­tomers have loy­al­ly sup­port­ed the ser­vice es­pe­cial­ly in the peak pe­ri­ods. How­ev­er, costs as­so­ci­at­ed with main­tain­ing the Boe­ing 767 air­craft op­er­a­tion led to the de­ci­sion of sim­pli­fy­ing the fleet and fo­cus­ing lim­it­ed re­sources to build bet­ter con­nec­tiv­i­ty in the North Amer­i­can and Caribbean mar­kets.

"We were not hap­py to see the air­craft de­part, since all air­lines, es­pe­cial­ly small ones take pride in op­er­at­ing wide-bod­ied air­planes, es­pe­cial­ly to des­ti­na­tions that are high­ly re­gard­ed in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. How­ev­er, in busi­ness some­times hard de­ci­sions have to be made. Nonethe­less, the year ahead promis­es to be an ex­cit­ing one for Caribbean Air­lines as we will be em­bark­ing on a ma­jor over­haul of how we do busi­ness," the state­ment con­tin­ued

"These im­prove­ments have al­ready be­gun with the com­ple­tion of phase one of our Pas­sen­ger Ser­vice Sys­tem up­grade to Amadeus on De­cem­ber 9, 2015. The sec­ond phase of the Amadeus mi­gra­tion which in­volves our Air­port check-in sys­tem will be com­plet­ed by March 2016.

The air­line said the change to Amadeus would pro­mote, at every cus­tomer touch point, ease of do­ing busi­ness with CAL, by of­fer­ing:

�2 Faster and eas­i­er web check-in

�2 Sim­pler ways to buy tick­ets, pay for up­grades and oth­er ser­vices

�2 Re­al-time in­for­ma­tion on reser­va­tions and flight changes

�2 Self-serve, user friend­ly air­port kiosks at Caribbean Air­lines des­ti­na­tions

"Amadeus' next-gen­er­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy en­ables Caribbean Air­lines to de­liv­er its vi­sion for an im­proved cus­tomer cen­tric trav­el ex­pe­ri­ence to bet­ter serve our val­ued cus­tomers," the air­line said.