A Portuguese airline will be soon be making its way to North America with new routes to three major cities next year.
27.07.2023 - 18:46 / smartertravel.com / Airlines / Credit Card
It would be an understatement to say that travel to Cuba hasn’t met the airlines’ expectations.
Last year, following the signing of a newly liberalized aviation agreement between the U.S. and Cuba, the Department of Transportation put the available Cuba routes up for competitive bidding by U.S. carriers. And compete they did, fully expecting that Cuba would become the next “It” destination.
When the dust settled, U.S. carriers had signed up to operate more than 20 daily flights between the U.S. and Havana, and around the same number of flights to secondary Cuban airports, amounting to more than 1.1 million one-way seats per year. That capacity has proven economically unsustainable.
Related:Free Coach Meals Coming to (Some) Delta FlightsAmerican was the first to recognize its over-commitment to the Cuba market, reducing the number of daily flights by a full 25 percent, and swapping in smaller planes on some routes.
In January, JetBlue sent a clear signal that demand for Cuba travel was weaker than forecast by offering triple bonus TrueBlue points for flights to Havana, Santa Clara, Camaguey, and Holguin. More recently, it began operating its Havana flights with 150-seat A320s instead of 200-seat A321s, and switched from 150-seat A320s to 100-seat E190s on other Cuba routes.
And Silver Airways has cut its weekly flights from Ft. Lauderdale to six Cuban cities.
According to the Airlines Reporting Corp., average roundtrip airfares to Cuba have dropped from $399 in September to $310 in January. Even then, there are anecdotal reports of travelers flying to Cuba on near-empty planes.
How did the airlines get it so wrong?
In addition to overestimating travelers’ enthusiasm for visiting the island, the airlines failed to factor in some of the off-putting impediments to Cuba tourism. For now, the embargo on tourist visits to Cuba remains in place, forcing travelers to misrepresent their real reasons for coming to the country. Credit cards are still not widely accepted in the country, so visitors must carry large amounts of cash. And they’ll need it: Prices for travel-related services like hotel stays and restaurant meals have skyrocketed since U.S. scheduled flights resumed, in August 2016.
All of which creates a dilemma for travelers. On the one hand, ticket prices for Cuba flights are probably at or near their bottom. So getting there is a bargain. But prices on the ground will more than offset any savings on airfare.
There’s a time factor to consider as well. As the country’s pace of modernization picks up, fueled by tourism, the “old Cuba” — what made it an attractive destination in the first place — is fast disappearing.
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Beginning on June 1, Spirit will become the third airline to pull out of the Cuba market altogether, joining Frontier and Silver Airways. Two other airlines, American and JetBlue, have cut capacity on their Cuba flights, either by reducing frequency or downgrading to smaller planes.
The last day in August marks the unofficial end of summer, and now also a historic day for U.S.-Cuba relations. JetBlue announced last month that it would be the first to send a passenger plane to Cuba in 2016, and at 10:58 a.m. today, fulfilled this promise.
Somebody had to be first. And when it comes to the relaunch of scheduled flights between the U.S. and Cuba, following the normalization of relations between the two countries after more than 50 years, it appears that JetBlue is set to snag those bragging rights.
In the latest blow to Cuba tourism, the U.S. Department of the Treasury today issued new restrictions on travel to the island nation.
In a historic agreement signed this week, the United States and Cuba have now resumed commercial air traffic between the two countries for the first time in 50 years, with routes expected to be running by fall 2016. Currently, only chartered flights are allowed to operate between the two countries.
With rules updating on a constant basis, you’ll need to know these eight new things if you want to travel to Cuba in 2016.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about discount airlines providing low-fare flights to European cities. London, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen are now an inexpensive Wow Air or Norweigan Air flight away from the U.S.—that is, if you’re willing to forego an in-flight meal and deal with a layover. But many business travelers and membership-savvy flyers aren’t looking for a cheap, lengthy flight sans free food.
Cuba’s swing from “It” destination to last year’s Caribbean wannabe has been nothing less than breathtaking, an unprecedented turnaround in the annals of tourism marketing.
With the launch of many new direct flights from the U.S. to Cuba, it may seem like the door to the formerly forbidden country is wide open for Americans. Unfortunately, that’s still not quite the case. Right now, you’ll still need to travel under one of the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 12 categories of travel, the easiest of which is a “people-to-people” Cuba educational tour.