I’ve spoken before about the reluctance of Caribbean governments to allow their citizens to benefit from airline competition, and here we have another example:
The Government has, for the time being, rejected Caribbean low-cost carrier Airone’s formal application to the Civil Aviation Authority for a licence to operate in Jamaica.
Airone, the brainchild of a group of Irish entrepreneurs, including Digicel’s vice-chairman Leslie Buckley, is seeking to establish a Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) with the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston serving as its hub.
Ostensibly, though, this time there’s a “good” excuse:
However, last Thursday, the minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Finance, Don Wehby, and a team of Government officials took the decision not to grant the new airline a licence now, essentially because the Government is in the process of divesting the loss-making Air Jamaica and it was felt that a decision to grant another carrier a licence at this time would adversely effect the divestment of the national carrier.
Now, I guess they have a point here. The government does need to weigh the potential cash windfall to the taxpayers (assuming the proceeds are used to the taxpayers’ benefit) against the benefits of a low cost competitor. On the other hand, the article makes clear that the government claims that they’d be willing to issue a license after AJ is divested, which… wouldn’t that also affect the value of AJ for potential buyers? One could imagine the eventual AJ investors lobbying against a license, and then, of course, the excuse would be some bullshit about how AJ represents Jamaican national character, or whatever. All this is to say nothing of the fact that the competition (and extra seats to a tourism dependent island) almost certainly outweighs the likely money from divesting AJ, especially given the tortured history of Caribbean airline privatization (see, also, BWIA).
But there’s a silver lining to all this:
“If we are unsuccessful in Jamaica we will set up operations in Barbados. If Air Jamaica is not divested in 12 months’ time, then Jamaica would have missed out on having an affordable, reliable carrier that would have been a boon to the tourism industry and Jamaicans living around the world.”
PLEASE oh PLEASE come to the Eastern Caribbean instead! I’d love to have another competitor to the horrible planes and service from BWIA Caribbean Airlines available.
Unrelated: As of this post, I am switching to using tags, rather than categories. In case you care.
