Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) is one of sev­er­al air­lines wait­ing to sign agree­ments with Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties for pay­ment of some US$3.8 bil­lion owed to them from tick­et sales in that fi­nan­cial­ly-trou­bled South Amer­i­can coun­try.The oth­er air­lines are Air Cana­da, Air France, Al­i­talia, Amer­i­can Air­lines, Avian­ca, Co­pa Air­lines, Delta Air Lines, Fed­er­al Ex­press, Iberia, LAC­SA, LAN Air­lines, Lufthansa, TACA, TAP Air Por­tu­gal and Unit­ed Air­lines.

In re­cent months an on­go­ing cur­ren­cy feud be­tween the gov­ern­ment in Cara­cas and in­ter­na­tion­al air­lines has made it near­ly im­pos­si­ble to fly to or from Venezuela.Some air­lines have cut back on flights and oth­ers have stopped fly­ing to the coun­try al­to­geth­er. The num­ber of tick­ets cur­rent­ly avail­able to and from Venezuela is just five per cent of the num­ber of­fered a year ago.

The sit­u­a­tion is the re­sult of the coun­try's sys­tem of mul­ti­ple ex­change rates and cur­ren­cy con­trols, which has forced air­lines to sell tick­ets in bo­li­vars with the promise that they will be able to send their rev­enues back home in dol­lars, us­ing the of­fi­cial ex­change rate. In re­cent months the gov­ern­ment has not al­lowed the air­lines to repa­tri­ate the mon­ey owed them for air­fares in for­eign cur­ren­cy.

While the sit­u­a­tion has caused sev­er­al car­ri­ers to re­duce or sus­pend flights to Venezuela, a CAL of­fi­cial told the T&T Guardian the state-owned air­line con­tin­ues to op­er­ate on the route. CAL cur­rent­ly op­er­ates flights to Cara­cas on Thurs­days, Fri­days, Sat­ur­days, Sun­days and Mon­days."I have been ad­vised to let you know that at this time, Caribbean Air­line's ser­vice to/from Cara­cas re­mains in­tact," the of­fi­cial said, then re­ferred this news­pa­per to a state­ment by the In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA) on the mat­ter.

IA­TA re­cent­ly launched a com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan with the goal of coax­ing the Nico­las Maduro ad­min­is­tra­tion in­to re­leas­ing all of the air­lines' mon­ey. So far the re­sponse from the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment has been to call the af­fect­ed air­lines to a meet­ing to make ver­bal com­mit­ments to re­lease the blocked mon­ey.IA­TA said it is con­fi­dent the strat­e­gy has been ef­fec­tive so far and plans to "con­tin­ue to draw at­ten­tion to the plight of the air­lines in Venezuela un­til an ap­pro­pri­ate so­lu­tion is reached."

Last month, Unit­ed Air­lines be­came the lat­est US car­ri­er to cut flights to Venezuela. Ser­vice will be re­duced to four round trips a week from the cur­rent dai­ly flights–a 43 per cent re­duc­tion–from Sep­tem­ber 17.From Au­gust 1, Delta Air Lines re­duced its ser­vice by 85 per cent, re­plac­ing its dai­ly roundtrip flight be­tween At­lanta and Cara­cas with one roundtrip week­end flight. Amer­i­can Air­lines cut its week­ly flights to the des­ti­na­tion to ten, down from 48 pre­vi­ous­ly.

Oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al air­lines that have tak­en sim­i­lar ac­tion in­clude Ital­ian air­line Al­i­talia which an­nounced in May that it was sus­pend­ing all flights to Venezuela "due to the on­go­ing crit­i­cal cur­ren­cy sit­u­a­tion" in the coun­try which is "no longer eco­nom­i­cal­ly sus­tain­able."The de­ci­sion by Al­i­talia fol­lowed a sim­i­lar sus­pen­sion in late March of all flights to Venezuela by Air Cana­da. Colom­bia's Avian­ca has re­duced flights by more than two-thirds and oth­er air­lines rep­re­sent­ed by the IA­TA are con­sid­er­ing sus­pend­ing all flights to that coun­try.

Lufthansa has re­duced its Frank­furt-Cara­cas ser­vice to three week­ly flights from dai­ly.