Man, airlines cannot make Cuba work right now! We’ve seen downguages and reductions in service, as well as outright cancelations of service. Now, Spirit is getting in on the action.
Currently, Spirit flies once to twice daily on its Ft. Lauderdale (FLL) – Havana (HAV) route. According to the Sun-Sentinel, service will start to be impacted on May 3rd, with the final flight leaving Ft. Lauderdale May 31st.
Effective May 3-23, the Havana service will operate once-daily only, but will revert to its twice-daily schedule from May 24-31, spokesman Paul Berry told the Sun-Sentinel…during the period when only one flight will operate, passengers already booked on its afternoon flight would be re-booked for the morning one, Berry noted.
As we’ve said before, Cuba is a tough nut to crack. We’ve seen downgauges from two airlines and service suspensions from two airlines. In an earlier post, I suggested that Alaska’s service from Los Angeles (LAX) to Havana (HAV) would be the next route dropped–I guess I was wrong about that!
Given that the authorities to fly these routes were hotly contested, I’m wondering if we’ll see another airline, specifically American, try to pick up Spirit’s vacated Havana slot. It could be a good land grab, if demand for Cuba ever seems to pick up.
Were you planning on flying Spirit to Cuba? Let us know below!
Header image courtesy of Alan Wilson via Wikimedia Commons
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The problem is/was with the airlines, not necessarily with Cuba itself.¹
Airlines were thinking — well, I don’t know what the heck airlines were thinking! Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but CLEARLY the demand for seats to Cuba was over-estimated. By a lot!
Secondly, the destinations were “wrong,” in that initially every airport in the country EXCEPT Havana was opened to US flights — well, OK, a couple of dirt landing strips also remained closed. Only later was the capital opened to US carriers, but you couldn’t get landing rights unless you also had (previously) been awarded them for the smaller, more dispersed destinations.²
As a result, oversupply to Cuba was a foregone conclusion! The only people interested in *flying* into destinations other than Havana would be Cuban-Americans “returning home” to see family — in many cases, family they had never before met, going to a country they had never seen. Tourists — Americans with no ancestral ties to the country — all want to go to Havana, not places like Camagüey or Holguín . . .
Somewhere Fidel is smiling at the buffoonery of the US airlines . . .
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¹ I am deliberately ignoring the Cuban infrastructure, or lack thereof. TTBOMK, no flight was ever cancelled due to facility problems at a Cuban airport, etc. — delayed perhaps; not cancelled. Besides, if other international carriers could fly into Cuba with its less than cutting edge infrastructure, US-based carriers could, too.
² Alaska being — again, TTBOMK — the sole exception to that.