Cayman Airways launches new direct flights to Panama City

The first flight of Cayman Airways’ relaunched route to Panama took to the air today, with several government ministers, dignitaries and airline personnel on board.

Cayman Airways is restarting its direct flights to Panama City with a view to expanding the islands’ tourism market throughout Latin and South America, and establishing a new regional trade route to access cheaper goods and services.

The official ribbon-cutting service took place at the Owen Roberts International Airport this morning (Monday, 26 June), followed by the first flight to Panama on a 737-8 aircraft.

“From a strategic perspective we went west with LA, and now we are going south with Panama, and we are already doing north, with New York and many other states within the American market,” said Tourism Minister Kenneth Bryan, who hinted at the possibility of an additional route opening up in the coming months.

The new Panama flight will service the Tocumen International Airport and now gives Cayman Airways 10 international destinations, the vast majority of which are in the US.

This is not the first time Cayman Airways has tried its hand at a direct Panama City flight. It launched seasonal flights to there in 1995, but those were scrapped several years later. Those were relaunched in June 2014, but did not run the following year.

“The reason we discontinued it was that, at that time, we were focused on other strategic tourism gateways, … Dallas, in particular,” the airline’s president and CEO Fabian Whorms told reporters following the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Whorms noted that, back in 2015, Cayman Airway’s ageing fleet of Boeing 737-300s, coupled with a clashing flight roster that created scheduling conflicts, resulted in the flight no longer being viable.

“This time around, we have the reliability of the four new 737-8 jets, we have a schedule that has much more capacity in terms of seats that we can offer, and the days of the week that this flight operates on… stays out of the prime tourism days,” he said added.

The new weekly flights operate on Mondays and Thursdays, with Cayman Airways arriving in Panama at 1:30pm and departing at 3pm.

The new dedicated route is the only such service between Cayman and Panama, and involves agreements between Cayman Airways and Copa, the national carrier of Panama, and other Latin American airlines, that will allow passengers to check their luggage from their original port of departure all the way to Grand Cayman and vice versa.

“What was there before is still there now, which is a multitude of reasons why the flight to Panama is good for Cayman,” said Whorms. “The Chamber of Commerce is very happy about it, the medical tourism fraternity is very happy about it, Caymanians who want go somewhere and have a little vacation… and do some shopping, they’re happy about it as well.”

New trade route

Chamber of Commerce President Nelson Dilbert, the owner of Cayman Spirits Company, views the new route as a win-win for businesses in Cayman and Panama.

“Using the US as our main supplier right now is leaving us vulnerable to high prices, and for us not to be able to negotiate,” he said.

According to Dilbert, the Chamber of Commerce first began exploring the possibility of a trade route between Cayman and Panama in 2006.

A year later, a 12-person delegation for the National Association of Industries of Honduras arrived in Cayman with a view of striking a trade deal between the two countries. It is not clear how fruitful those talks panned out to be.

However, Dilbert believes these new negotiations may provide the solution to cheaper goods and products to help drive down Cayman’s increasing cost of living.

“Our mission at the Chamber is going to be to try to find new and exciting routes that businesses here can find and source, and make it cheaper for our community… and not just importing from Panama but also exporting some of the beautiful products that we also produce here,” he said.