In a re­gion of over 7,000 is­lands, and span­ning over 2.7 mil­lion square kilo­me­tres, air trans­port is more than a con­ve­nience... it’s a ne­ces­si­ty. But get­ting from one is­land to the next can of­ten be a strug­gle, char­ac­terised by in­con­ve­nient timeta­bles and mul­ti-sec­tor tick­ets on sev­er­al car­ri­ers. in­ter­Caribbean Air­ways, how­ev­er, with its bright­ly coloured air­plane tails and a “con­nect­ing you” brand promise, is at­tempt­ing to change that by link­ing the en­tire Caribbean in­to one seam­less net­work.

Born out of a de­sire to see his girl­friend in the neigh­bour­ing Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Turks and Caicos na­tive Lyn­don Gar­diner has built his com­pa­ny from an in­for­mal on-de­mand char­ter op­er­a­tion with a sin­gle Cess­na air­craft to the largest pri­vate­ly owned air­line in the Caribbean. With a route net­work that be­gins in the north, in Nas­sau, Ba­hamas, and ex­tends as far south as George­town, Guyana, in­ter­Caribbean Air­ways now flies to over 26 des­ti­na­tions and count­ing.

Its suc­cess is no fluke, as in­ter­Caribbean’s CEO Trevor Sadler told Guardian Me­dia, de­spite what some view as rapid ex­pan­sion.

“We move care­ful­ly. We don’t try to do too much too quick­ly. We get a new mar­ket, we set­tle down, we take a look, okay, what’s the next step, and it could be an­oth­er coun­try or more fre­quen­cy de­pend­ing on where it is,” he said.

That next step is Trinidad. Start­ing March 8, the air­line will launch four week­ly sched­uled flights be­tween Trinidad and Bar­ba­dos, of­fer­ing at least 14 on­ward same-day con­nec­tions. It’s a move that puts it in di­rect com­pe­ti­tion with state-owned Caribbean Air­lines.

But while Caribbean Air­lines of­fers ap­prox­i­mate­ly five dai­ly flights to Bar­ba­dos, Sadler in­sists they are en­ter­ing the T&T mar­ket not just as com­peti­tors but as col­lab­o­ra­tors.

The com­pa­nies have in­ter­line agree­ments in place, al­low­ing for the sale of each oth­er’s tick­ets. And Sadler has not ruled out tak­ing it one step fur­ther up to a code­share agree­ment, but ex­plained it would re­quire “re­newed con­ver­sa­tion” with the Caribbean Air­lines man­age­ment.

An in­dus­try vet­er­an him­self, Sadler has pushed for a gen­er­al re­gion­al tax, ar­gu­ing that if more Caribbean peo­ple could af­ford to fly in­ter-re­gion­al­ly, they would spend with­in the var­i­ous economies as they would be able to trav­el more of­ten.

“(For) the peo­ple of the Caribbean, trav­el isn’t just a lux­u­ry, it re­al­ly is my means to get around some­where for busi­ness, vis­it fam­i­ly, and it’s not a lux­u­ry to be able to see your fam­i­ly,” Sadler em­pha­sised. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, he has seen lit­tle will­ing­ness from re­gion­al gov­ern­ments to ease the bur­den.

“We haven’t seen en­gage­ment from any coun­try. We did have two coun­tries make a very short-term re­duc­tion, but not long enough for it to have any mean­ing­ful im­pact,” he lament­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA) di­rec­tor gen­er­al Willie Walsh, Caribbean car­ri­ers face unique chal­lenges that aren’t al­ways ob­vi­ous to the av­er­age per­son, in­clud­ing high­er fu­el costs, cur­ren­cy volatil­i­ty and air­port/tick­et tax­es.

A 2018 Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank work­ing pa­per on air trans­port com­pet­i­tive­ness and con­nec­tiv­i­ty found that if cer­tain pol­i­cy op­tions, in­clud­ing the re­duc­tion of tax­es, were to be im­ple­ment­ed, it could po­ten­tial­ly in­crease long-term em­ploy­ment, add 288,000 jobs, and US$4.4 bil­lion in GDP across the Caribbean.

In the mean­time, the air­line con­tin­ues to fo­cus on con­nect­ing and trans­fer traf­fic, lever­ag­ing its Bar­ba­dos hub and its many in­ter­line agree­ments with oth­er car­ri­ers to fu­el growth. Grant­ley Adams In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port (BGI) has be­come in­creas­ing­ly at­trac­tive to Eu­ro­pean and North Amer­i­can car­ri­ers and is now a ma­jor traf­fic hub in the South­ern Caribbean. In 2025, it record­ed 2.4 mil­lion ar­rivals - the high­est in its his­to­ry.

In­ter­Caribbean cur­rent­ly op­er­ates over 200 flights out of BGI, and Sadler is con­vinced there is still room for more growth once vis­i­tors can eas­i­ly trans­fer on to in­ter­Caribbean flights.

“It’s im­por­tant to give vis­i­tors to the re­gion the eas­i­est trans­fer ex­pe­ri­ence that we can de­liv­er, both in­bound and out­bound, which means I check you in on your air­line that’s go­ing to the UK, your bag gets trans­ferred at the trans­fer point, you get to see your bag when you ar­rive at your des­ti­na­tion and we give you the board­ing card for the next step of the leg and you sim­ply go through the in­tran­sit process at the con­nec­tion point,” he said.

And even if a pas­sen­ger is not on an in­bound UK or North Amer­i­can flight, Sadler wants fly­ing in­ter-re­gion­al­ly to be just as seam­less.

“The re­gion is on­ly 40 mil­lion or so peo­ple, but every­one com­plains about get­ting around the Caribbean. I would hope we see some peo­ple whose be­gin­ning and end is Bar­ba­dos, but oth­ers who are go­ing off to Tor­to­la or go­ing off to Do­mini­ca or An­tigua or sim­ply the time of day that al­lows you to, from our fre­quen­cies, say I can do a day’s busi­ness in Bar­ba­dos and then get on an af­ter­noon flight and then con­tin­ue to some­where be­cause we have fre­quen­cy across the re­gion.”

In­ter­Caribbean can­not af­ford to of­fer rock-bot­tom fares, so Sadler’s ap­proach is to use re­al­is­tic pric­ing mod­els to get pas­sen­gers in­to the air. As for ser­vice, he says he aims not to “over promise and there­by un­der de­liv­er”.

How­ev­er, de­spite win­ning sev­er­al awards over the years from the World Trav­el Awards, in­clud­ing World’s Lead­ing Re­gion­al Air­line in 2024 and Caribbean Lead­ing Cab­in Crew three years in a row, the air­line has come in for crit­i­cism from some re­gion­al gov­ern­ments. In 2024, the British Vir­gin Is­lands gov­ern­ment urged the air­line to “rec­ti­fy in­ad­e­quate ser­vice lev­els pro­vid­ed to trav­ellers”.

“And in 2023, top Guyanese of­fi­cials warned the air­line it could face pos­si­ble sanc­tions if it didn’t im­prove its ser­vices. At the time, in­ter­Caribbean blamed the prob­lems on “on­go­ing staffing is­sues”.

Fast for­ward to to­day, the car­ri­er is in­vest­ing in a com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem to let trav­ellers know about is­sues via email, text, and soon via What­sApp.

“Some­times some of those [is­sues] are about the speed at which we can com­mu­ni­cate,” Sadler said. “It’s not for the want of com­mu­ni­cat­ing, but some­times, let’s say, there’s a flight in­ter­rup­tion. Now you want to know the an­swer be­fore we’ve fig­ured out what the an­swer is. I can’t give you an an­swer un­til we’ve de­ter­mined what’s the sit­u­a­tion, re­place an air­plane, move peo­ple on to an­oth­er flight and so forth. We in­vest­ed a lot in com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems (so) that if I got to share bad news, I’ll let you know quick­er than I pos­si­bly can oth­er­wise,” he added.

As for the fu­ture, Sadler is keep­ing those cards close to his chest, but he did re­veal that To­ba­go could be added to in­ter­Caribbean’s route map one day.

“To­ba­go is an im­por­tant des­ti­na­tion for us. We haven’t made a com­mit­ted en­try date. We cer­tain­ly are very in­ter­est­ed in es­tab­lish­ing the tim­ing of when we can al­so con­nect To­ba­go to our net­work to in­crease the in­bound tourism op­por­tu­ni­ties.”