British Airways is set to increase its Grand Cayman-to-London flights, starting in April.
The airline, in a statement Monday, said it will boost its four weekly flights to five.
The flights, between Heathrow Airport and Owen Roberts International Airport, with a brief stopover in Nassau, Bahamas, will run Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Diane Corrie, British Airways’ commercial manager for the Caribbean, said the increase in airlift complements initiatives to bring more visitors to the Cayman Islands and to offer increased options for travel to London and beyond from Cayman.
She added that the fifth weekly flight “will better serve representatives of the corporate community, including the business and finance sector and other residents of Cayman who travel frequently on British Airways for business and leisure and to visit friends and family”.
Last week, Deputy Premier and Tourism Minister Moses Kirkconnell advised legislators of the increase in London airlift.
Kirkconnell also said that, in June next year, American Airlines will begin direct flights from JFK, New York, once a week on Saturdays. He added that Cayman Airways would resume its non-stop weekly flights to Denver in December, with those flights increasing to twice weekly In March.
Air arrivals
Jan.-Sept. 2019
386,290
2018
463,001
2017
418,403
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That’s an interesting spin on this news.
Having used this service regularly since it was flown LGW-GCM-NAS-LGW using DC-10s in the early 1990s I can say with some certainty that the vast majority of BA’s passengers on the route are transiting between the UK and the Bahamas. The same goes for when the Nassau service continues on to TCI. Most of time I rather doubt that BA are even covering the operating costs of flying 777s in and out of ORIA.
The real reason for the extra service seems to be (according to UK sources) that BA are responding to the Bahamas’ recovery from Hurricane Dorian and that is not good news for the Cayman islands.
In operational terms flying the legs from Nassau to GCM and PLS must be a nightmare. I suspect the only reason BA didn’t hand these connections over to local airlines years ago is load factors – would CAL operate GCM-NAS for BA with an maximum uplift of only 60-70 passengers?