The Hon. Minister for Tourism Hon, Senator Robert Tonge as well as Hon. Minister for Ports, Senator Miriam Blanchard met with the management of LIAT on behalf of Government.
The meeting which took place on Thursday, May 10th, 2016 gave Government a chance to state clearly Dominica’s position on the airline’s quality of service to the country as well as to hear directly from LIAT the current challenges facing the airline.
GIS News spoke with the Hon. Minister for Tourism, Senator Robert Tonge, on Thursday, May 12th, 2016.
“The Hon Prime Minister wrote LIAT about his disappointment about the manner in which they handled a particular flight and generally the type of scheduling that we get. The Ministry of Tourism has been speaking about the fact that we are being adversely affected by the number of flights and the level of LIAT’s service. May persons have to overnight in other countries and cannot reach Dominica immediately. That will increase the cost and time it takes to come to Dominica.
“We had a meeting with two executives of LIAT, Julie Reifer-Jones the Acting CEO and CFO and Lloyd Carswell the Chief Commercial Officer.
“The meeting was very good because it allowed us to understand LIAT’s challenges; I think before you can put too much pressure on someone, you first need to understand their challenges,” he reported.
The Hon. Minister revealed that the number of LIAT flights to and from the island and the timeliness of those flights were discussed.
“Many flights are late coming to Dominica and that impacts passengers and tourists. We spoke to them about improving their customer service, timeliness and schedule.”
He revealed that shortly after Tropical Storm Erika in 2015, LIAT was down from about 15 aircraft to nine.
“They had to reorganize themselves and create a new schedule. Unfortunately, that schedule impacted us greatly so we have been having discussions with them a on regular basis to get the schedule to benefit our people in Dominica.”
Coming out of that meeting, the Hon. Minister says is a new flight schedule which accessible on LIAT’s website and will take effect on June first.
LIAT’s additional aircraft is also anticipated to improve flight performance.
The Discover Dominica Authority of the Ministry of Tourism has put in place a committee to further advance the issue of air access to Dominica.
“We have an Air Access Committee at the Discover Dominica Authority which is responsible for discussing with different airlines and getting as many flights here as possible.”
He listed direct flights from Europe to the US to Guadeloupe and Martinique via Norwegian Airlines which he believes is a benefit to Dominica.
Additionally, Senator Tonge says Air Antilles has joined LIAT and L’express Des Iles to take passengers to and from the French islands and Dominica on the same day.
“We’re consistently working with many other airlines to try to improve the air access to Dominica. We are also supporting an air access conference in June where access operators will come to Dominica to better understand our challenges and discuss new ways to make access to Dominica better.”
