U.S. Government Tightens Cuba Travel Restrictions

August brings the last month of peak seasonal temperatures. There is also a last hurrah of summer travel before school resumes. Labor Day weekend signals that fall is right around the corner. As has been the case for most of the year, the travel restrictions are minimal for most destinations.

Washington lawmakers are flyers, too. Frequent flyers in most cases.

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.

It would be an understatement to say that travel to Cuba hasn’t met the airlines’ expectations.

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.

Since diplomatic relations with Cuba were reinstated and a newly liberalized U.S.-Cuba aviation agreement was enacted last year, travel between the two countries has been a decidedly up-and-down affair.

Emirates has announced it will reduce service between Dubai and almost half its destinations in the U.S. Flights to Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles will be reduced from two per day to one, and daily flights to Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale will be reduced to five per week each. The total number of weekly flights cut comes to 25.

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.