Southwest Airlines will launch a new seasonal daily non-stop route between Grand Cayman and Orlando, Florida, next week, replacing its current Fort Lauderdale service.
The new route is a result of Southwest Airlines relocating its hub from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando.
The inaugural flight between Cayman and Orlando will be on Tuesday, 4 June, with the Fort Lauderdale-Cayman route being retired on 3 June.
The route will be daily until mid-August, weekly on Saturdays from then until the end of October, and daily again from November.
“The opportunities for the Cayman Islands is to ensure Southwest travellers have an efficient connection point from the West Coast and Mid-west region of the United States… which improves the destination’s Transatlantic connectivity with several daily direct routes between Orlando, the UK and the European mainland,” Cayman’s Department of Tourism said in a statement.
Cayman’s Director of Tourism Rosa Harris congratulated the airline, in the statement, on its move to Orlando, adding that the Department of Tourism was “happy that the Cayman Islands’ seat capacity from Florida is stabilised”.
Seat capacity to and from Florida, and other American states, was severely impacted in the aftermath of COVID-19, with airlines taking some time to relaunch routes they had run to Cayman prior to the pandemic.
Harris noted that the introduction of direct, daily flights from Orlando “gives Northern Floridians the opportunity to explore more of what the Cayman Islands has to offer and allows Cayman residents to explore Orlando’s many parks and attractions”.
Southwest’s chief operating officer Andrew Watterson in October last year announced the airline’s plan to move its hub to Orlando.
He explained at the time that the airline connects significant numbers of travellers from further north in the US to Caribbean destinations via its Florida flights, and that Southwest run more flights to northern markets from Orlando than from Fort Lauderdale.
He stated that changing airport hubs would “offer better connectivity in our domestic network via the nearly 140 daily departures” from Orlando International Airport.
The new Orlando-Cayman flight will take just under two hours.
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