German-owned three-star low-cost airline, Eurowings, canceled all its Caribbean flights earlier this week. Barbados tourism officials are hoping that the decision will be temporary even as they welcomed the news that Barbados had concluded an air services agreement with the government of Qatar.
Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Tourism Authority (BTA), Dr. Jens Thraenhart, confirmed the departure of the German airline, saying the news was communicated to the region last week.
“So, this is obviously short-term. It’s very hard to kind of work with that. But that’s the situation that we are in. We are working on trying to make something happen. I mean obviously, we have directors in our core markets in the UK [United Kingdom] and in Europe, Canada, US [United States] and in the Caribbean.
“We have daily calls with airlines. I have a call actually today with a German airline. We are looking to try to save this lost flight we got from Eurowings. We are working daily; we have two top aviation consultants who are working with us. It is a priority,” Thraenhart told the 35th Annual General Meeting of the Tourism Development Corporation (TDC).
He said Eurowings had reassigned the planes that were scheduled to come to the region, to North America which he said is a more profitable route.
Eurowings made its first non-stop, ten-hour flight to Barbados in 2019 landing at the Grantley Adams International Airport with almost 300 passengers, giving Barbados greater access to traffic from Europe.
Thraenhart acknowledged the difficulty for Barbados to compete with other destinations for airlift and that the island is caught up in a complex scenario as it relates to how airlines select destinations to which they fly.
“It has something to do with business travel, something to do with trade, cargo, and it also has something to do with this volatile situation that we are in right now where a lot of things are actually out of our control: high fuel prices, labor shortage, and capacity shortage.
“In the end, in order to get the airlift, we need to drive consumer demand. In order to drive consumer demand, we need to tell a compelling story that makes people want to come here and beaches alone will not do that. We need to change the way we tell the story and sustainability, and experiences are a way to change that narrative,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Barbados government has announced it has concluded an air services agreement with Qatar on the margins of the International Civil Aviation Organization’s 41st General Assembly that ended in Canada earlier this week.
CMC/
