American Airlines is set to touch down on local shores on 17 Feb., marking the formal return of the US carrier since borders were first closed in March 2020.
Brian Metham, American Airlines senior specialist global communications, said the airline will resume its Grand Cayman route starting with flights from Miami.
“We’re eager to resume service to GCM (Grand Cayman). Beginning Feb. 17, we’ll fly between MIA (Miami International Airport) and GCM once daily except on Saturdays when we increase to three times/day. Then starting March 5, we’ll resume service between CLT (Charlotte, North Carolina) and GCM on Saturdays, increasing to daily April 5,” Metham told the Cayman Compass in an emailed statement.
Metham said customers can find the full schedule for all Grand Cayman flights on the airline’s website, aa.com, as they continue to update their offerings.
The return of American Airlines was originally carded for December but the carrier cancelled that plan due to COVID-19 restrictions still in place in Cayman at the time.
However, in January, Tourism Minister Kenneth Bryan announced the airline’s return this month as Cayman entered a revised version of phase 5 under government’s border-reopening plan.
Under this phase, children under 11, travelling with vaccinated adults, will no longer be required to isolate. This change removed a major hurdle for travellers who previously would have had to quarantine with their kids for 14 days.
Deputy Governor Franz Manderson, who heads up the border-reopening programme board, appeared on the Compass Compass weekly talk show The Resh Hour on Wednesday, and said this change will help boost Cayman’s tourism numbers.
However, he added, the priority remains protecting the local community.
Since the unlocking of borders on 20 Nov., he said 34,000 people have visited Cayman.
“Last year we had 45,000 for the full year. So really for the first three months of our reopening we have almost surpassed what we were seeing in the whole of last year,” he said.
“We are seeing these numbers with limited carriers,” Manderson added.
He said people want to travel and there is a “great desire” to come to Cayman.
“Our Department of Tourism has not been sitting on its hands over the last year-and-a-half. They have been putting [out] good policies, procedures, commercials… doing everything they can to market Cayman… so when we were ready to reopen they could press a button and tell [the world] we are open. [W]e are seeing the benefits of that,” he said.
In addition to American Airlines, he said, other carriers are returning to Cayman which will “boost tourism and allow more and more people to come in and experience the beloved Cayman Islands”.
United Airlines is set to resume service from Chicago, Houston, Washington and Newark this month.
Cayman Airways flights from Denver will resume Saturdays starting 26 Feb., while Delta will once again fly from Atlanta in March.
Southwest Airlines service from Fort Lauderdale and Baltimore is also expected to resume in the coming months.
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34 thousand people since Nov. 20? By my math that is around 450 people/day. That many people are really taking the seemingly never ending testing/quarantine gamble? I’m inclined to believe that these are mostly Caymanians returning from a pleasant stay in the USA where there are no mandatory tests nor a PCR to leave. That sounds so silly just writing it but that’s where Cayman still is. Madness.
I continue to say tourism is not returning until testing on days 2/5/7 is ended. The threat of extended quarantine and time spent standing in line to test on 2 or 3 days of your visit is not how anyone wants to spend their vacation. There are plenty of other destinations where these requirements do not exist. I wonder if American will actualy fly those plans here if they are empty?
Press the button already then…
When the cure is worse than the illness……
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects,
they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In
consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy
instrument.”
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220204/lockdowns-covid-deaths-study
Meanwhile:
“Some 409,347 under-18s were referred to the NHS in England for specialist care for issues such as suicidal thoughts and self harm between April and October 2021.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-60197150
When the fear of illness and death are a greater burden than the joy of living life itself, we have merely exchanged one pandemic for another.
AA are not as keen to return as first thought. Their GCM-DFW service scheduled to resume in May four times a week has just been cut to one a week (Sats) and future bookings for the other three weekdays have been automatically rebooked via Miami. Hardly a strong endorsement of AA’s commitment.