Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

In Au­gust 2023, Air Cana­da axed plans to op­er­ate flights to Trinidad cit­ing crew short­ages. Now, just over a year lat­er, the Mon­tre­al-based car­ri­er is an­nounc­ing plans to re­sume flights be­tween Toron­to and Port of Spain come May 1st, 2025. Ac­cord­ing to a me­dia re­lease, the air­line will op­er­ate year-round 4x week­ly flights on Sun­days, Mon­days, Thurs­days, and Fri­days. AC984 de­parts Toron­to’s Pear­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port at 8 pm ar­riv­ing at Pi­ar­co Int’l Air­port at 1:35 am the next morn­ing. AC985 de­parts Port of Spain at 2:35 am, ar­riv­ing back in Toron­to at 8:25am. The air­line will use its Boe­ing 737 Max 8 fleet with 169 seats on the route and tick­ets are al­ready on sale.

The Min­istry of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts says Air Cana­da’s an­nounce­ment is a ‘sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone’ for T&T in sev­er­al key ar­eas in­clud­ing “tourism growth and in­creased vis­i­tors, eas­i­er trav­el for busi­ness and trade, and cul­tur­al ex­change.” Min­is­ter of Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts, Ran­dall Mitchell, says the min­istry met with Air Cana­da sev­er­al times at Routes Amer­i­c­as but there was un­cer­tain­ty on when the air­line would re­turn to our shores. He says this flight will “again bring the world, and in par­tic­u­lar our di­as­po­ra clos­er to us, fa­cil­i­tat­ing tourism, trade, and the ex­change of cul­ture be­tween Cana­da and our beau­ti­ful is­lands. We are con­fi­dent that this en­hanced con­nec­tiv­i­ty will dri­ve new op­por­tu­ni­ties for our hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­try and oth­er sec­tors, as well as en­cour­age Cana­di­ans to vis­it and ex­plore the rich her­itage, di­verse land­scapes, and warm hos­pi­tal­i­ty that our na­tion is known for."

The restora­tion of the POS ser­vice is one of sev­er­al new and re­turn­ing routes an­nounced to­day by Air Cana­da. The air­line plans to in­tro­duce new flights be­tween Mon­tre­al and Naples, Italy and Mon­tre­al and Por­to, Por­tu­gal. It is al­so rein­tro­duc­ing Toron­to to Prague, and Ot­tawa to Lon­don flights. Air Cana­da says it will of­fer over 100,000 week­ly seats to 30 des­ti­na­tions across Eu­rope and North Africa in the peak of Sum­mer 2025.

Mean­while, KLM Roy­al Dutch Air­lines’ Am­s­ter­dam-POS route con­tin­ues to per­form strong­ly with a record­ed av­er­age load fac­tor of 93%. In Oc­to­ber the air­line added an ex­tra week­ly flight bring­ing the num­ber of flights to Trinidad to 5. Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell says there is al­so the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the air­line op­er­at­ing a sixth flight per week dur­ing the peak Car­ni­val 2025 pe­ri­od. Mitchell says this shows the steady growth in de­mand for trav­el from pas­sen­gers in the Benelux (Bel­gium, Nether­lands, and Lux­em­bourg) re­gion, and be­yond to Trinidad as da­ta from the pre­vi­ous win­ter sea­son (Oc­to­ber 2022 – March 2023) shows the air­line pre­vi­ous­ly op­er­at­ed four flights per week. The air­line will con­tin­ue to use its Air­bus A330 fleet on the route.