COME April 27, JetBlue will drop the Barbados flight to Fort Lauderdale.

This was recently revealed by the airline as it unveiled a shake-up of routes, which includes a number of dropped or reduced routes, as well as the introduction of new routes.

It was back in October 2015 that the airline announced plans to start a daily Fort Lauderdale flight to start in April 2016. The number of flights per week were later reduced.

Responding to the announcement, Chief Executive Officer (Ag) of the Barbados Tourism Management Inc, Robert Chase, opined that this move by JetBlue will not have a significant impact on the overall performance coming out of the United States.

“We are considering that we will be down probably a couple percentage points in seats coming from the US in the next year, but at the same time we are looking to develop new partners out of the US. So while the current situation may evolve, we are hoping it will evolve to add new seats.”

The CEO told The Barbados Advocate: “There is still tremendous airlift out of the US with JetBlue, and our partnership with JetBlue still remains very strong. They made a commercial decision in terms of Fort Lauderdale route and they will make other commercial decisions and adjustments as they go along, but we are confident at the same time we will continue to strengthen that partnership and build other routes that we want to see come out of the US.

“At the same time, JetBlue is not our only partner and we are always growing our partnerships with our airlift, so American Airlines continues to be a strong partner so we continue to have a large number of seats coming out of the US to service both our visitors, our Barbadian public as well as the Diaspora.

“So we don’t think there is going to be a significant fall-out …at the same time we are very mindful that visitor arrivals is so critically tied to the presence of airlift and the competitiveness of prices is also a function of the extent to which people have choices. So we will look for new options and we will continue to grow those options, but there is no doubt that we have a strong partnership and tremendous airlift out of the US,” he said. (JH)