Jet fuel spike threatens Caribbean tourism

De­spite the pos­si­bil­i­ty of in­creased de­mand for flights in­to the re­gion, Caribbean Tourism Or­ga­ni­za­tion chair­man Ian Good­hill-Edghill is warn­ing that the cur­rent spike in jet fu­el prices could se­ri­ous­ly im­pact tourism. Jet fu­el prices across the globe have surged due to the US/Is­rael-Iran con­flict, dou­bling air­lines’ fu­el bills and forc­ing them to in­crease tick­et prices, cut routes and ca­pac­i­ty, and in­tro­duce fu­el sur­charges in some in­stances.

Re­gion­al air­lines have not been spared; Sint Maarten-based Winair is re­port­ed­ly weigh­ing the in­tro­duc­tion of a fu­el sur­charge af­ter its fu­el bill al­most dou­bled from US$550,000 in Feb­ru­ary to near­ly US$900,000 in March. Lo­cal car­ri­er Caribbean Air­lines in­tro­duced a US$15 to US$25 sur­charge per sec­tor on April 10.

De­scrib­ing the sit­u­a­tion as “chal­leng­ing”, Good­hill-Edghill told Guardian Me­dia that, de­spite it be­ing ear­ly days, the or­gan­i­sa­tion con­tin­ues to mon­i­tor de­vel­op­ments. He said, “We don’t have enough in­for­ma­tion at this point, be­cause you would ap­pre­ci­ate that there are cus­tomers who would have booked, so they’re in the for­ward book­ing sphere. We have to mon­i­tor the for­ward book­ings as a re­gion, and cer­tain­ly Bar­ba­dos is do­ing that, to see what knock-on im­pact, if any, it’s like­ly to have.”

Many re­gion­al economies are heav­i­ly de­pen­dent on ma­jor source mar­kets like the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, and Good­hill-Edghill ar­gued that in­creased air­lift helps fu­el growth and sus­tain Caribbean economies. Ac­cord­ing to him, work is be­ing done re­gion­al­ly to main­tain mar­ket share. “With­in the Caribbean, there’s an ag­gres­sive­ness to en­sure that we main­tain our share of the mar­ket for the Caribbean,” he said, adding, “I’m acute­ly aware all min­is­ters in the re­gion are def­i­nite­ly work­ing to main­tain that.”

In the mean­time, Good­hill-Edghill, who is al­so Bar­ba­dos’ Tourism and In­ter­na­tion­al Trans­port min­is­ter, re­vealed that his min­istry is re­fin­ing its growth strat­e­gy to not on­ly main­tain mar­ket share but in­crease it by boost­ing Bar­ba­dos’ long-stay pas­sen­ger num­bers. “The good thing about Bar­ba­dos is that we have long-stay ar­rivals in­creas­ing based on [our] in­creased air­lift, and at the same time we al­so have cruise pas­sen­gers. We have more than 50% of the cruise ships that come to Bar­ba­dos home-port­ing in Bar­ba­dos, which al­so adds val­ue to the des­ti­na­tion.”

Last sea­son, Bar­ba­dos re­ceived over 800,000 cruise ship vis­i­tors, and the Grant­ley Adams In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port han­dled 2.4 mil­lion pas­sen­gers, the high­est vol­ume in the air­port’s his­to­ry. The air­port will be ex­pand­ed at a cost of 120 mil­lion Bar­ba­dos dol­lars, with con­struc­tion ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed in 2028.