Seaborne Airlines, the regional carrier based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and the British Virgin Islands Tourist Board, in collaboration with the BVI Airport Authority announced Monday the start of daily round-trip flights between the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport to the BVI’s Terrence B. Lettsome International Airport starting Dec. 8.
With a 20-year career at Ford, Mark Buzzell has been appointed managing director of Ford International Business Development Inc. for the Caribbean and Central America region, to which he will import his expertise in sales, marketing and service operations for the Ford and Lincoln brands.
Hoteliers are generally optimistic that 2012 will bring a modest recovery to Caribbean tourism arrivals, but at a recent conference in San Juan, there was plenty of grumbling that for too long, hotels have been shouldering an unfair tax burden when compared to the cruise industry.
A tax originally imposed by the British government to fight global warming is being viewed in the English-speaking Caribbean as a penalty against long-haul air travelers — and regional tourism officials are furious about it.
For years, the conventional wisdom was that an eventual end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba would open the floodgates for millions of curious Americans dying to visit the once-forbidden island — while the rest of the Caribbean would, at least initially, suffer a sharp downturn in U.S. tourist arrivals.
Caribbean islands are aggressively courting new tourism markets as restrictive U.K. airline taxes and hard times in the United States keep thousands of potential British and American visitors at home.
St. Maarten and St. Kitts will soon be home to two unrelated mega-resorts that aim to dramatically boost tourism to both Eastern Caribbean islands.
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