The new regional budget airline, REDjet, today announced it was expanding its service to Antigua and began selling tickets for flights between Trinidad and Guyana, just days after securing licences under the terms of a bilateral 'open-skies' air services agreement.
CEO Ian Burns told Antigua's Daily Observer that the Antiguan authorities have granted REDjet permission to begin flights to St John's. The airline plans to inaugurate a direct Antigua-Guyana route "by around early October", the paper said.
"We are delighted. Antigua is a very important part of the Eastern Caribbean and is like a little hub in itself,"' the Observer quoted him as saying.
"We are excited about flying there. We would like to develop some more routes out of there as well. We would see Antigua as a starting point and we hopefully would be going into bigger destinations,"' he added.
The announcement of the Antigua approval comes on the day the fledgling carrier began selling seats on a new Trinidad-Guyana service.
Antigua is home to a significant Guyanese immigrant worker population.
Last week, the Trinidad and Tobago Civil Aviation Authority granted the airline licences to operate scheduled services to and from Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Georgetown, Guyana, and Kingston, Jamaica, as intermediate and points beyond Trinidad and Tobago, the airline said.
The licences were granted in keeping an "'open-skies' agreement between Port of Spain and Bridgetown that allows for mutual recognition of carriers and automatic permission for air services between and beyond their respective territories.