No room on board

Now you have to book a very long time in advance on British Airways (BA) or be marooned. For example, to fly to London in mid-August is costing between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds sterling (GBP), roughly equivalent to TT$13,000-$19,000 on BA, depending on the dates, and there are no more seats left in economy class, even if you had the $13,000 to pay for it on certain flights. That fare is around $10,000 more than it was in March.

It used to be possible to cross the Atlantic non-stop on our national airline, CAL, for around 700GBP economy level in August, but now BA customers must pay more than double as there is no alternative carrier and we must endure being island-hopped around the Caribbean on both legs of the journey as they collect and deposit more important tourist passengers.

CAL, British Airways and Virgin were the three big commercial carriers operating between TT and London, gateway to Europe. Now British Airways enjoys a virtual monopoly on the Trinidad route while Virgin Airlines mops up most of the Tobago-London route.

The consequence is that BA fares, always more expensive than CAL, have been slowly going through the roof as the number of flights are inadequate to demand.

The reason for CAL closing down that long-haul service, as told to us, was its unprofitability and the desire to focus, for commercial reasons, on the North American and Caribbean routes.

According to statistics from Sabre Airport Intelligence, in December 2012 the CAL-operated route — the only non-stop service to London from Trinidad — had an average of 94 percent capacity and in June 2015 that figure was 87 percent. Even this lower level is not a bad average by any business reckoning.

Anecdotally, I can add that the flights were always packed to capacity whenever I travelled, perhaps in the busier months. It is therefore very difficult to accept the argument about the route not offering a good yield, even if the fares were more competitively priced than BA’s. It is a capacity percentage that many operators would be extremely happy to have.

So what was the real reason for closing down that important air bridge and what is the effect? I have no inside information on this but I would argue that there were political reasons, or even economic ones that were not strictly commercial and not to the advantage of the public, made easy by the abundant failure on the part of the Tourism Development Company to sell both TT and CAL in the UK and Europe.

The effect is twofold: 1) to make tourism even less likely to pay dividends, turning our backs on the world’s eastern hemisphere as we make ourselves subject to the commercial whims of foreign carriers on those routes; 2) to weaken cultural connections with the UK and Europe and therefore reduce the opportunity to influence cultural, social and political decisions that will affect us in the future.

We are terrible at tourism. Generally, we fail at top-class service and the quality of our sun, sea and sand product is low compared to other islands in the Caribbean and along the Caribbean coastline from Miami to Store Bay, taking in everywhere in-between. We have no wonderful sites and the possible wild-nature experience remains under-exploited, yet we are focusing on the hotly competitive US market. Sandals is only one element of a solution; our problems run much deeper