Switching gears

From where Frank Galan sits, it’s a flight path that hopefully will bag profits and passengers along the way.  As Director of Caribbean Affairs, Continental Airlines, he talks optimistically about Con-tinental adding another feather in its cap: a direct flight from Trinidad to Houston. “We set the bar and let others climb towards it,” he said in an interview in Houston last week. “We’re not afraid of competition.” Members of the TT media were invited to get a first hand look at how Continental operates in the sky and were given a whirlwind tour of Houston. In 1994, he said the airline was sinking fast, and that it had no money. “We were consistently the last airline, we were consistently rude,” he said.  That year, senior airline executives came up with a plan in a garage to try and turn the company around. “We had to stop doing stupid things,” he said.

This included being late, something that the airline was notorious for. The airline also had to find out what customers wanted. “You would think that we knew what that was after almost 70 years,” he said in a booming voice. “It hit us that if we stopped being late, we would sell more tickets,” he said. The airline has come a long way since then. When it added the TT flight to its international route, other airlines took notice. For this flight, Continental uses a big Boeing 737, flying four times a week, and which  became effective June 10. It took about six hours flying to get to Houston. Continental is the fifth largest airline in the US. In global terms, the airline is no fly weight. Continental Airlines is the world’s sixth-largest airline with more than 2,800 daily departures throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. Continental serves 149 domestic and 117 international destinations and carries approximately 51 million passengers per year.

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Continental, like other global carriers, took a nosedive in its operations and profits.
When other airlines stopped serving food on board, Continental kept dishing it out. “We were losing lots of money but our customers came first,” Galan said. TT travellers have apparently taken the Houston bait. On the flight to Houston last week, there were few empty seats and on the way back, the flight was full. It helped that there was a full meal being served, two movies, and magazines to read. “It beats going to Florida,” said one female passenger on the trip back to Trinidad. She was meeting TCL executives the next morning and would be flying out the next day. She said she welcomed Continental’s direct flight to TT.

Another businessman, who lived in New Orleans, said Continental’s flight  came along at the right time. “You can just zip in and zip back out,” he said. He too hated the idea of going through Miami. Miami, he said, was just too much of a hassle. For his part, Galan thinks that it was a good strategic move to add TT to its route. Like a chess player planning all its moves, Continental knew that TT was an energy titan and also picked up on the fact that the corporate energy ties between Houston and TT were strong. The airline carefully looked at the odds, and saw them in its favour. “You can’t get away from the fact that TT has oil and gas,” Galan reasoned and described the country as having a “burgeoning economic front.” In December 2003, the airline tested the waters when it inaugurated its flight from Port-of-Spain to Newark Liberty International Airport.  In June this year, it added the TT-Houston route to its flight arsenal. With the flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica, to Houston, taking off also in June, Continentals is clearly cementing its position in the Caribbean.