OUR CARIBBEAN: No time-out on our airline challenges

By Rickey Singh

Those Caribbean Community Heads of Government and leading private sector entrepreneurs who continually support the region’s economic integration movement should perhaps give urgent attention to a new initiative to deal with the critical problems of regional air transportation.

And the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who has lead responsibility for regional air and sea transportation in CARICOM’s quasi-cabinet, has an obligation to initiate arrangements for such a meeting.

Last February, the Prime Ministers of the three major shareholder governments for LIAT — Barbados; Antigua and Barbuda’s Baldwin Spencer and St Vincent and the Grenadines – had reaffirmed commitment to help ensure support for the regional carrier.

The dramatic suspension last weekend of flight operations by the Barbados-based carrier REDjet, amid continuing stress for LIAT, further underscores the urgency for an enlightened initiative by the key players in the public and private sectors.

The region’s vital tourism sector is reputed to be four times more dependenton air travel than any other region of the world.

REDjet’s problems seem to be like those associated with the short-lived Carib Express – despite its advantage of having been launched as a joint regional government/private sector venture.

In 1995 Sir Neville Nicholls, then president of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), said: “The fate of Carib Express was sealed on the very day it was launched . . .”.

According to his assessment, the carrier was launched “prematurely” without “proper pre-launch marketing and defined route rights”.

Enter REDjet, as the new kid on the regional air transportation block in 2011, and we are now hearing from different regional voices how hasty its principals were in rushing into a Caribbean market without required knowledge of its regulatory environment, or sufficiently sensitized to the political and cultural factors that cannot be disassociated from the ultimate decision in approving the licence to operate a regional commercial airline service.

Carib Express had among its public relations spokesmen not only leading regional entrepreneurs but a few significant prime ministers as well, with some quite sharp criticisms aimed at LIAT. The REDjet backers, on the other hand, had placed heavy emphasis on its competitive fare structure and claimed capacity to provide “reliable and efficient service”.

However, the really big problem remains to be addressed – majority ownership of a regional airline – possibly in partnership with foreign investors – to respond to intra-regional and extra-regional travel demands. There should no longer be “time out” by the political directorate on coming to grips with the advantages of ownership of a regional airline to serve today’s needs of our region.

Source:  http://www.nationnews.com