US airlines vie for Cuba flights from large cities
by Associated Press
MIAMIMar 04, 2016 - 12:00 am GMT+3
by Associated Press
Mar 04, 2016 12:00 am
U.S. airlines are looking to serve Cuba primarily from their large hub cities, with Havana being the most popular destination. At least eight carriers submitted applications to the U.S. Department of Transportation on Wednesday outlining what routes they would like to fly.
The government will spend the next few months reviewing the requests and is expected to award the contested Havana routes this summer. Flights to smaller cities if uncontested and lacking any contentious issues could be approved much sooner. Once routes are awarded, airlines will still need time to develop schedules and actually sell seats on the flights. And while the U.S. government will set the routes, airlines will also need to apply to Cuba's civil aviation authority for a permit to operate in the country.
All flights operating between the two countries today are charters, but an agreement signed between the two nations last month allows for up to 110 additional flights more than five times the current charter operations. Only 20 of those flights can go to Havana, in addition to the current 10 to 15 charter flights a day. The rest would fly to other Cuban cities. U.S. tourists still won't legally be allowed to visit Cuba but the start of commercial flights will make it much easier for those who fall into one of the authorized travel categories. Charter flights are expensive, frequently chaotic and lack many of the traditional supports of commercial aviation such as online booking and 24-hour customer service.
Most of the planes proposed by U.S. airlines would carry about 160 passengers. Nearly 160,000 U.S. leisure travelers flew to Cuba last year, along with hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans visiting family. Tourism is still barred, but the number of legal reasons to go to Cuba from organizing professional meetings to distributing information to Cubans has grown so large and is so loosely enforced that the distinction from tourism has blurred significantly.
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