Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

Air Cana­da is set to re­launch its Toron­to-Port of Spain route on May 2, two years af­ter abrupt­ly can­celling plans to re­sume fly­ing to T&T. How­ev­er, in a change from its ini­tial an­nounce­ment, the air­line will now op­er­ate three week­ly year-round flights in­stead of four. The Cana­di­an car­ri­er plans to op­er­ate non­stop overnight flights on Mon­days, Fri­days, and Sun­days out of Toron­to. The ser­vice will use Boe­ing 737 Max 8 air­craft from Air Cana­da’s main­line fleet, with 169 seats (16 busi­ness, 153 econ­o­my) - adding over 4,000 seats to the mar­ket.

Luis Nor­ie­ga, Air Cana­da’s Latam and Caribbean sales di­rec­tor, told Guardian Me­dia at a news con­fer­enceat the Hilton Trinidad, that the de­ci­sion to re­turn is the cul­mi­na­tion of plan­ning that be­gan last year.

“Our de­ci­sion to fly to Port of Spain is not re­lat­ed to [the cur­rent] geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. We ac­tu­al­ly de­cid­ed to come here last year, and we've been work­ing on mak­ing this route suc­cess­ful by its own mer­its. As you know we did it up un­til 2020 and it was a very suc­cess­ful route,” said Nor­ie­ga.

In a re­cent on­line post, UK-based glob­al trav­el da­ta provider, OAG Avi­a­tion, re­port­ed on trou­bling trend - fu­ture flight book­ings be­tween Cana­da and the US have col­lapsed by over 70 per cent in every month through to the end of Sep­tem­ber. Nor­ie­ga ac­knowl­edged there has been some un­cer­tain­ty, and the air­line has seen some soft­en­ing in cer­tain mar­kets. How­ev­er, oth­er mar­kets like the Caribbean have seen grow­ing de­mand.

“Cana­da to the Caribbean, for ex­am­ple, it's been grow­ing. Cana­da to Mex­i­co and South Amer­i­ca is grow­ing. We see some good per­for­mance in some of the Eu­ro­pean des­ti­na­tions we just launched. We see op­por­tu­ni­ties and we'll adapt our sched­ule to where the op­por­tu­ni­ties lie,” he said.

De­spite sup­ply chain chal­lenges that con­tin­ues to plague the avi­a­tion in­dus­try, Nor­ie­ga said Air Cana­da is set to re­ceive al­most 90 air­craft in the next five years. This alone makes him con­fi­dent that the car­ri­er is here to stay.

“And not on­ly con­fi­dent, we're ex­cit­ed to be back, def­i­nite­ly,” he added.

Air Cana­da joins lo­cal car­ri­er Caribbean Air­lines on the route, but Nor­ie­ga is not wor­ried. In fact, he wel­comes the com­pe­ti­tion.

“We have con­sis­tent­ly been se­lect­ed the best North Amer­i­can air­line or the sec­ond best North Amer­i­can air­line. So, we will be bring­ing a far su­pe­ri­or prod­uct than the av­er­age. That said, we wel­come com­pe­ti­tion with Caribbean Air­lines. You know, it makes us both bet­ter. I think that the fact that we're go­ing to be here is go­ing to help strength­en the re­la­tion­ship be­tween Cana­da and Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said.

And with T&T’s for­eign ex­change chal­lenges ever present, the air­line is will­ing to work with pas­sen­gers. Namie Bridge­lal-Ali GSA Laz­zari & Samp­son sales man­ag­er said pas­sen­gers can pay on­line in US or Cana­di­an dol­lars but lo­cal trav­el agents and GSA Laz­zari & Samp­son can process pay­ments in TT dol­lars.