Low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines has announced that it will now be offering a weekly flight from Kansas City, Missouri, to Jamaica.
The flight will arrive at the Sangster International Airport (SIA) in Montego Bay on Saturdays throughout the winter season.
Some 114 passengers and six crew members arrived on the inaugural flight on Oct. 7, which was greeted by tourism stakeholders and local officials, including the Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett.
The minister said that new flights speak to how well-connected Jamaica is as a destination in the United States.
“We cover 18 gateways that connect us to over 100 cities across the U.S. That makes Jamaica the most connected Caribbean destination to the United States,” he noted.
Greeting the passengers, he observed how pleased they were to be visiting the island.
“I must confess that it is the happiest bunch of passengers that I have ever welcomed to Jamaica, from the little toddlers right up to the elderly,” he expressed.
Deputy Mayor of Montego Bay, Councillor Richard Vernon, who was also at the airport to greet the passengers said Montego Bay was happy to welcome new flight.
“Jamaica was chosen, but it is a very special thing when Montego Bay in particular is chosen, so we are happy and we are looking forward to the additional connectivity that we are having to America,” he outlined.
In his remarks, Chief Executive Officer at MBJ Airports, operators of SIA, Shane Munroe, that the service from Kansas City “will bring a new and varied type of passenger to the country”.
“Normally, we are well served from the east and our traffic continues to grow from the eastern coast of the United States, but now we are seeing growth in the Midwest.
“We look forward to the exchange between the cities and, certainly, we expect that this service will continue to grow, and we look forward to additional flights added to this route in the near future,” Munroe said.
Record tourist arrivals for 2023
The Tourism Minister said that the island is on track to close out the year with some 2.9 million stopover visitors and expressed optimism of surpassing the three-million mark in stopover arrivals next year, with earnings of more than $4.5 billion.
More tourism news from Jamaica:
- Jamaica’s tourism booms with strongest summer in history
- Jamaica’s tourism sector soars with increased air traffic from the U.S.
- Jamaica’s minister of tourism announces one million visitor arrivals to date for 2023
Last month, Bartlett said that the country witnessed its most robust summer season in recorded history. He shared that stopover visitors surpassed 800,000.
He added that including the cruise passenger figures—which is an additional 230,000—the total number of visitors exceeded one million.
“ [We had] just a little over a million visitors in the period and we earned US$1.5 billion for Jamaica in this summer, the highest and best that we have had,” Bartlett said.
