Regional travel to be cheaper

By Staff and wire

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) ministers responsible for civil aviation, transport and tourism on Friday said they had arrived at a formula which, once approved, will make intra-regional travel less complicated and expensive and will attract more international airlift to the Caribbean.

The ministers concluded a one-day meeting here Friday ahead of Sunday’s official opening of the 30th annual Caribbean Tourism Conference (CTO) schedule for the Puerto Rico Convention Centre from October 21-24.

Chairman of the CTO, St. Lucia’s Tourism Minister Allen Chastanet told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) that the CARICOM ministers, joined by their counterparts from the Dutch, Spanish and French Caribbean, have accepted a plan to treat the region as one space, based on the accepted view that intra-regional travel was still too difficult and expensive considering the distance between the territories.

"We will be paying attention to a structure in which regional carriers can all collaborate with each other, and given the size and population of the region, make our region more affordable by jointly agreeing to streamline international regulations which do not apply to our area but only make access to international airlift more expensive and complicated," Chastanet said.

He said that the ministers accepted the fact that regional carriers such as Air Jamaica, Caribbean Airlines and LIAT have their place within the region and agreed that issues such as airspace and the civil aviation international transport environment cannot be handed over to foreign carriers.

"We have accepted the position that for social, political and wider economic reasons we need to have our own airlines," the CTO chairman noted, in response to the view that there needed to be one Caribbean airline.

An upbeat Noel Lynch, Barbados’ Minister for Tourism and Civil Aviation told CMC that for the first time in the history of meetings of regional ministers responsible for aviation, an agreement had been reached on specific timeframes for the improvements in the entire transportation environment.

"We were very specific about what we need to do against the backdrop of the fact that air transportation is arguably the lifeblood of the regional transportation sector with an inextricable link between air transportation and tourism," Lynch said.

"We have been able to make significant headway on issues and set a timetable to achieve functional cooperation between airlines, determining the benchmarks which allow other regions with similar development profiles to achieve the success that continues to elude us, and resolving issues which retard our growth such as taxation, costs, over regulation, and the concept not only of open skies but a common airspace," Lynch told CMC.

Lynch said that while there has always been the political will among ministers to advance the developmental process, they had previously been hampered by "certain issues and mechanisms".

However, he said that the CARICOM team was generally satisfied that systems have now been put in place to obtain results.