Travel expected to increase with BVI-St Maarten partnership
The BVI Airports Authority (BVIAA) said it is expecting air travel to the Terrance B Lettsome International Airport on Beef Island to increase as passengers travelling to the territory through St Maarten will see a significant reduction in the in-transit fees at the Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA).
These fees are being dropped from $55 to $30.
A media release from the BVIAA said this fee reduction was born from a partnership between officials from the BVI Airports Authority and the Princess Juliana International Airport in St. Maarten. The partnership was cemented during a meeting between the two entities earlier this month.
BVIAA Managing Director Kurt Menal said the Authority will continue its conversations with St Maarten and will soon announce when this reduction will take effect for passengers travelling to the BVI via St Maarten.
“The necessary framework to bring this project to fruition is being fine-tuned and the team in St Maarten is currently putting the final touches together to allow passengers to enjoy the benefits of the partnership,” he explained.
In the meantime, the BVIAA also announced that St Maarten’s national carrier WinAir, which currently operates a 19-seat twin otter aircraft in the territory, is in the process of expanding its fleet and service offerings to the VI with the introduction of two 48-seat ATR 42 aircraft.
“I cannot underscore enough how important such partnerships are as St Maarten is one of the major hubs that connects the Caribbean region to Europe and the BVI is perfectly positioned to tap into the European market with this partnership,” said Minister of Communications and Works, Kye Rymer.
The BVIAA’s management said its board is committed to increasing air access to the BVI and connecting the region and the rest of the world to the territory.
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Meanwhile fees are double that for USVI, PR, or USA travel.
This is a St Marten initiative. Stop taking credit for other people initiative.
flies in or out of Beef Island airport unless some corporation, government, trust fund, smuggler, etc. is paying the air fare and all the exorbitant fees.
Such nonsense.
So let’s say your round trip ticket BVI – SXM was USD555.
It’s going to be USD530 now.
USD555 vs. USD530
That’s the same amount if you ask me when it comes to making the decision if I can afford to travel.
Move on, not one additional traveler will come because of this.
We just need to work on our own airports so
that we get direct flights coming to these
beautiful Virgin Islands and stopped looking at others to do it for us.i know we can do it.
Sorry but we can’t do it. No long haul flights from anywhere unless our runway is longer. But that will never happen. Scrub island and leverick bay residents will fight it tooth and nail. Any BVI won’t lower rates to land to allow commercial airlines to add more flights. We gouge the flying public with landing fees so expensive that of course airlines will go elsewhere like STT.
We have so many taxes, fees, permits, and charges added to visitors when they come here. We’re lucky they still want to…
samething with American Airline
Beautiful Virgin Islands? So you want to add extra runway length and completely cut off Trellis Bay, an area of natural beauty and ecological value? You want to have big jets come in every day with hundreds of passengers and think the planes and people will have no impact at all on our beauty? Every plane spews gas and oil, every passenger means more cars driven around, plastic used and littered/burnt, more sewage discharged into our ocean or, alternatively, onto our streets, more energy consumed. And yes, it means more jobs, but for who? For even more low paid immigrants than we already have.
And the tourists need rooms to stay in. So we have to build more hotels, which means we destroy more nature, most likely on or near Beef Island in one of the few untouched areas we have left. Each hotel will bring new needs and new reasons to destroy even more nature – coastal construction, more sewage, oil and diesel power, desalination, etc. means even more dead reefs, even fewer fish, more destroyed mangroves, etc etc.
All of this to attract people to our ‘beautiful’ islands, and make a very small number of people even richer – think about who will get the contracts for building the airport, hotels etc, for supplying the concrete, etc etc. Not we the people – them who already run things anyway and have ENORMOUS bank accounts already. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is going to benefit WE.
True, visitors love these islands because they mostly remain beautiful to them, but we are right on the edge of destroying so much nature in our quest for overflowing bank accounts that many tourists now prefer other parts of the world where the governments have been more intelligent.
We need to think bigger and think better than that old colonial formula of endless growth a) destroying the goose that lays the egg by paving paradise with concrete while b) continuing to destroy nature and pretending that the massive crises that scientists and others worldwide are screaming about, are just not happening here. The BVI is not somehow separate from everywhere else on planet earth but we go on like ecological collapse due to human expansion is just not happening. It is..
“BVI Love” talking about our “beauty” is a real example of our own special BVI self delusion. These days, the BVI hates tourists, and outsiders in general, and here’s this poster mindlessly saying we should invite in more people we hate, to destroy the remaining beauty our islands – all the while pretending we love and respect both the people and the beauty.
Be honest. We don’t.
We urgently need a formula for happy, healthy, well educated BVIslanders living in a healthy environment for generation after generation to come – not just MORE MORE MORE NOW NOW NOW, consequences be damned.
$25 at the Spanish bars is $25.