Citing low bookings for travel and a high number of cancellations by passengers on the Guyana to United States route, rebranded Eastern Airlines yesterday announced that it was temporarily suspending flights on the route, leaving the jobs of close to 150 in limbo.
A missive to the Director General of the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) Egbert Field, from Senior Director of the airlines, Josh Bustos, stated, “Eastern Airlines regrets to inform you that we will be suspending service to Guyana for the next few months due to the ongoing pandemic and new travel restrictions in place.”
The decision comes on the heels of the new COVID-19 restrictions that were implemented and took effect from January 26.
The US Centers for Disease Control requires all air passengers two years of age and over, entering the US to present a negative COVID-19 test, taken within three calendar days of departure, or proof of recovery from the virus within the last 90 days.
Bustos informed the GCAA that since the new restrictions took effect in the US, bookings in the Guyana market plummeted. “At the present time Eastern Airlines is seeing more cancellations than confirmed bookings,” Bustos said.
He however assured that the airlines is in the process of reviewing all liabilities and ensuring that all their obligations are met in Guyana. He further stated that they are processing refunds for all affected passengers.
The Senior Director also indicated that the airline will reconsider returning to the route later in the year should travel restrictions be lifted and air travel returns to a form of normalcy.
Bustos, in the letter sent to Field which was seen by this newspaper, also hinted that the airline would be seeking approval to operate on the Guyana to Toronto route. Should approval be given, flights will commence by the summer season of this year.
“We look forward to starting Toronto service this summer and await your final consideration to put these flights on sale as soon as possible,” he indicated.
Even before its suspension of operations, the airline had announced via its website that a number of flights had been cancelled and that bookings were suspended.
Gerry Gouveia Jnr, Managing Director of Roraima Airways which operates the ground handling for the airline said that the suspension will have a direct impact on employees who are a part of the ground handling team.
“It will greatly impact the workers. We don’t know what the plans of the other airlines are but we will have to pay close attention to it. The tourism and travel industries have been significantly impacted as a result of COVID-19 but we will have to keep monitoring the impacts,” he said. It is unclear if the company will be temporarily laying off any employees.
According to Gouveia, the airlines had advised travel agents to stop taking bookings a short while ago.
He explained that from observations of flight trends at the airport, operations have become unsustainable as there is a low passenger traffic and pointed out that one of Caribbean Airlines’ flights from Toronto, Canada, only had 50 passengers.
Surprise
The suspension of operations caught the government by surprise as they were unaware of the airline’s decision.
According to a statement from the Ministry of Public Works, “This decision by the airline, which commenced operations less than one year ago, is yet to be officially communicated to the Government of Guyana.”
The ministry said that within the past few days the GCAA held several discussions with the company and during those discussions, there was no mention of the suspension of flights to Georgetown.
Word of the airline’s suspension was first made public by the Leader of the Opposition Joseph Harmon, who issued a statement yesterday calling for government’s immediate intervention.
“The passengers were given no notice by Eastern Airlines of this decision to discontinue service and several of them are now stranded in Guyana and unable to make their way back to the United States to return to their families and jobs,” the statement from the opposition leader said.
The Ministry of Public Works yesterday assured that the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, and the Guyana Revenue Authority currently have bonds in place with Eastern Airlines to help protect passengers and state agencies.
Eastern Airlines’ last flight operations were on Saturday, February 6 and their next scheduled flight was expected on Friday, February 12, the ministry said.
The airline operated four flights weekly in January 2021, but this was significantly reduced in the last two weeks.
During the initial stages of the pandemic, the airline was granted approval for repatriation flights between Guyana and the US.
Special flights were operated between Guyana and New York and Miami. The airline was the first to operate flights after the reopening of the country’s two international airports.
“Eastern Airlines provides the most direct and economical flights to underserved markets around the globe,” the airline said on its website following its launch.
Field had said “Eastern Airlines is a reborn Dynamic Airlines that went through the bankruptcy court and they now have this official name of Eastern Airlines. We carried out our standard process in evaluating the documents presented to us for safety, security and economics and we gave our analysis, confirming that the documentation presented to us was authentic and followed the standards set out by the home state, the United States. It is more or less a verification of those documents that the GCAA does.”
In December 2018, just a year after quitting Guyana, the rebranded airline had applied for a three-year licence with plans to ply the Georgetown-New York route once a week.
After serving the Guyana-New York route from the middle of 2014 with numerous delays, cancellations, and once running off the runway, Dynamic Airways quit the Guyana market in October, 2017. Hundreds of persons were left stranded, even as the airline assured that they would get refunds on their purchases. Only in May 2019 were passengers able to collect their refunds.
