Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

Jet­Blue Air­ways is mak­ing ma­jor ad­just­ments to its route net­work, in­clud­ing the cut­ting of 37 routes in­to 2023. Amongst them is the Fort Laud­erdale-Port-of-Spain route.

Back in Ju­ly, the New York-based car­ri­er an­nounced it would sus­pend flights be­tween PoS and Ft Laud­erdale un­til De­cem­ber 24, 2022.

Ac­cord­ing to Jet­Blue, this lat­est sus­pen­sion is aimed at im­prov­ing “op­er­a­tional re­li­a­bil­i­ty.” A check on Jet­Blue’s web­site shows no flights for the Ft Laud­erdale-PoS route avail­able for book­ing up un­til Ju­ly, 2023. The air­line con­tin­ues to fly dai­ly out of New York’s John F. Kennedy Air­port.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, Jet­Blue said, "To en­sure con­tin­ued op­er­a­tional re­li­a­bil­i­ty, we’re plan­ning a sched­ule change for this fall and in­to 2023 that will ex­tend some of the mar­ket sus­pen­sions we put in place ear­li­er this year. This sum­mer has been more re­silient be­cause of the ca­pac­i­ty pull­downs we put in place and we be­lieve it’s pru­dent to plan sim­i­lar­ly for next year.

"We’re get­ting ahead of it now to ease pres­sure on our Cus­tomer Sup­port team and to of­fer more time for re­book­ing our cus­tomers. These sus­pen­sions are pri­mar­i­ly in mar­kets and air­ports that are es­pe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing from an op­er­a­tional or ATC per­spec­tive. Jet­Blue will sus­pend op­er­a­tions be­tween Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and To­ba­go and Fort Laud­erdale, Flori­da from Oc­to­ber -De­cem­ber. Jet­Blue will con­tin­ue to op­er­ate JFK-PoS route with one dai­ly flight."

It added, "At the same time, it’s shap­ing up to be an­oth­er year of ex­pan­sion for Jet­Blue in 2023 as we grow our fleet with more Mint Air­bus A321 air­craft – in­clud­ing the long-range (LR) ver­sion – and more A220 air­craft. We’re al­so ex­cit­ed to launch our next Eu­ro­pean des­ti­na­tion and add more fly­ing in our New York, Boston, Fort Laud­erdale, Los An­ge­les and Or­lan­do fo­cus cities. Over­all, we’ll grow our ca­pac­i­ty (mea­sured by avail­able seat miles – ASMs) in the mid- to high- sin­gle dig­its be­yond where we are to­day. Still, as we ex­pand, we want to set our op­er­a­tion up for suc­cess and en­sure it’s run­ning re­li­ably for our cus­tomers and crew mem­bers."

Port-of-Spain is not the on­ly af­fect­ed route, as Jet­Blue has al­so cut ser­vice to St Lu­cia (UVF), St Maarten (SXM), Mon­tego Bay (MBJ) and Nas­sau (NAS).

Af­fect­ed trav­ellers with ex­ist­ing reser­va­tions will re­port­ed­ly be re-ac­com­mo­dat­ed on oth­er Jet­Blue flights, or of­fered a full re­fund.

This an­nounce­ment leaves state car­ri­er Caribbean Air­lines as the on­ly op­er­a­tor on the FLL-PoS route. Caribbean Air­lines cur­rent­ly flies to Fort Laud­erdale from Port-of-Spain twice week­ly.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day on whether the air­line would con­sid­er in­creas­ing flights on the PoS-FLL route, CAL Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er Dionne Ligoure said, “Caribbean Air­lines is al­ways look­ing close­ly at its op­er­a­tions and sched­ule to de­ter­mine how best it can add val­ue to the fly­ing needs of our cus­tomers. How­ev­er, this has to be done giv­ing full con­sid­er­a­tion to our avail­able re­sources.”