The name Contour Airlines, not to be confused with German leisure carrier Condor Airlines, probably doesn’t ring a bell if you live in the Caribbean. Yet over the past few months, the carrier better known in the US than in the Caribbean has quietly been laying the groundwork to become a strong competitor in the region. On October 5 it will add another destination to its budding Caribbean network when it begins flying twice weekly between Trinidad’s Piarco International Airport (POS) and Dominica’s Douglas–Charles Airport (DOM), with one-stop, same-plane connections to St. Thomas (STT) and Puerto Rico (SJU).
The service means T&T and Dominica will once again be directly connected by air, mere months after majority state-owned Caribbean Airlines (CAL) ended service to the island, citing almost $5 million in losses.
But how does Contour Airlines plan to succeed on a route that CAL struggled to make profitable? A big part of that answer boils down to aviation economics 101. Caribbean Airlines operated the route with an ATR 72-600, a turboprop designed for short-haul flying, outfitted with 68-72 seats depending on the configuration. Turboprops are commonly used in the Caribbean because of their efficiency and their CASM (Cost per Available Seat Mile) is lower when full. At the higher 72-seat configuration, Caribbean Airlines needed 60 revenue passengers per sector to meet the industry-standard load factor of 84 per cent.
Contour is taking a different approach. It plans to use an Embraer ERJ 145 regional jet configured with just 30 seats, even though it’s designed to carry around 50 passengers. De-densification of the cabin drives up the CASM of the jet but reduces the overall total trip cost. At a target load factor of 75 to 80 per cent, the airline only needs 23 to 24 revenue passengers per flight. Crew costs are also lower because only one flight attendant is needed. In simple terms, Caribbean Airlines needed 60 passengers for each flight to make the route work, Contour needs fewer than half that number.
The real test is whether Contour can consistently attract 24 passengers twice a week in each direction.
President of Contour Airlines Ben Munson believes the airline’s hard product is strong enough to entice travellers to do just that. In an interview with the Business Guardian last week, he said, “There are two seats on one side of the aisle, one seat on the other, so if folks are traveling solo, they’re able to spread out or a couple, it’s very comfortable as well and able to give everybody about 36 to 38 inches of seat pitch...free snacks and beverages on board as well.”
Such a generous seat pitch and free food is something usually reserved for domestic first class/business class cabins, but Contour isn’t positioning itself as a premium airline. While Munson said it’s close to a full-service airline, Contour’s Caribbean fares have followed the industry trend of unbundling fares. i.e. the amenities you get with your ticket depend on how much you paid, and baggage always comes at a cost. With this cost structure, the airline is catering for all types of passengers.
“We’d like everyone,” Munson said. “We don’t discriminate between business and leisure travellers. I think it probably is going to need a healthy mix of folks to be able to work most routes too, but we built the schedule in a way that we thought it could work for both,” he continued.
Add in shorter and faster sector completion times due to the ERJ 145’s jet performance, and Contour may have the right combination to make these thin routes work.
The Tennessee-based regional carrier has built its core business around connecting underserved markets to larger hubs and onto its interline partners such as American Airlines, JetBlue and United. Now Munson sees what he calls an “adjacent opportunity” to build in the Caribbean, what the airline built in the United States.
“Where we see opportunities generally in the Caribbean for us is that identifying places where non-stop service makes sense generally. It can be augmented with connections for sure, but generally where there’s a decent amount of demand, and we happen to have aircraft in good positions and the right size to be able to connect places that otherwise wouldn’t have non-stop air service,” said the airline president.
The ERJ 145 has a range of 1,500 nautical miles, he said, but Contour’s focus is on choosing routes that make sense economically, not just where the airplane can physically fly.
The idea of tapping into underserved markets in the Caribbean is certainly not a novel idea. Low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines set up a base in Puerto Rico and started service all over the Eastern Caribbean based on that very idea. Two years later, the airline is now a distant memory in those markets, having pulled out of most due to poor demand amongst other operational factors.
Contour Airlines doesn’t plan to go down that path, aiming instead to be around for the long term.
“Our intention anytime we’re going into a market is that we’re kind of a permanent fixture there,” Munson explained. “We don’t expect to necessarily make money on day one, but it’s got to be building and showing momentum. If things don’t work, you can lose a lot of money in aviation very quickly.”
Contour’s move into the Eastern and Southern Caribbean comes at a time when overall network connectivity in the region is down. According to data from UK-based analytics company OAG Aviation, seat capacity in the Caribbean fell by 4.6 per cent in August. That translates to over 200,000 seats - second only to the Middle East. Contour will only add 30 seats per sector, but for some communities, those 30 seats could mean the difference between a direct connection to a major hub, and a multi-day/multi-stop journey.
In the Caribbean, a network disruption could easily turn into a one-to-two day wait for the next flight. To avoid that, Contour has invested heavily in its operational reliability. According to Munson, since Caribbean operations began in October 2025, the airline’s completion factor is over 99 per cent and on-time performance is “hovering” around 80 per cent despite having only one aircraft running scheduled flights.
“We’ve got spare aircraft as well. And when we’ve had aircraft that do have mechanical issues that are going to take a while to address, we fly aircraft in from Tennessee,” he said. “We invest very heavily to make sure that we reset and get our system back on time,” he was quick to add. Another aircraft will be added in the winter months, but Munson assured that Contour’s full Caribbean operations schedule can be completed with just one aircraft if needed.
As the airline builds out its Caribbean network, the airline’s management will be crunching the numbers carefully, but while it initially plans to go alone in the Caribbean, Munson doesn’t rule out the possibility of partnering with CAL.
“We’re not trying to come in and push Caribbean out,” he said, adding, “I think we’re going to do things that are complementary, hopefully, and if we’d have the ability to connect folks onto their network and vice versa, then I think that is mutually advantageous.”
