Air Jamaica hopes to bring more tourists
Good news from the tourism industry dominates our broadcast tonight…and that is the impending arrival of Air Jamaica. This afternoon a high powered delegation from the land of reggae gave a presentation on why the aggressive airline will soon be making big waves in the small pond called Belize. News 5’s Stewart Krohn reports.
Stewart Krohn, Reporting
Never mind that the flight only runs four times a week and the route between Montego Bay and Belize City is yet to prove its viability…the formal presentation of Air Jamaican’s new service to Belize was big news for the tourism industry.
Mark Espat, Minister of Tourism
“The bottom line is that we have thirty-seven thousand additional seats, annualise, coming into Belize next year and leaving. As important, is the fact that there are major gateways that will connect through Montego Bay markets that we already have a presence in, such as Atlanta, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, Boston. These are markets that are doing well for Belize and have the potential to do much better.”
That ability to do much better will also apply to flights within the region, as Belizeans and Jamaicans can now visit each other without an expensive detour through Miami, and you won’t need a U.S. visa.
For Air Jamaica, the route is a natural extension of its hub and spoke system under which tourists fly from major cities in North America into Montego Bay and then on to their final destinations in the Caribbean…and now Central America. It’s an ambitious plan and the plane chosen for the service is the Airbus A321…with a capacity for one hundred and eighty-eight passengers. Can all those seats be filled with warm bodies?
George DeMercado, V.P., Sales, Air Jamaica
“Well I think our expectations for the start is to have at least a fifty to sixty percent load factor. But I don’t think it will be long before we fill it. If you stop and think about it, yes it’s one plane coming in here from Montego Bay, but we’re feeding it from all over the U.S. We’re feeding it from Cayman, we’re feeding it from Havana. So I don’t think we’re gonna have a problem filling it, in addition to the traffic that we get from Jamaica. So we’re optimistic.”
No less optimistic is Tourism Minister Mark Espat, especially with the news that in addition to Air Jamaica, even more seats will be added by U.S. Air, American and Continental. The question now is: will there be enough hotel rooms?
Mark Espat
“One of the things that is remarkable about Belize is that our average hotel size is eleven rooms. We have approximately five thousand rooms in our hotel bank, but the average hotel size is just eleven. That, I think, has been very beneficial in terms of spreading the tourism wealth around as much as is possible within tourism. I think we’re going to have to see some bigger hotels, simply because tour operators in Europe, tour operators in the United States, want to negotiate big contracts, they want to know they’re going to get a specific quality, a specific price and a specific block. So I think that you will see in the near future, some bigger properties developing, certainly on the islands, perhaps Placencia, maybe even in Cayo. It’s an inevitable occurrence.”
The inaugural flight will touch down in Belize at 1:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, the twenty-first of November. Stewart Krohn, for News 5.
One pleasant surprise announced at today’s official launch was that over the inaugural November twenty-first weekend, Air Jamaica would be flying in the Reggae Boys, for a friendly football match against what will be called the Belize National Team.
