No timing for resuming commercial travel to Cuba
American Airlines announced Tuesday it will offer charter flights between Los Angeles international Airport and Havana, Cuba, beginning later this year.
The administration is also pushing to loosen the restrictions on travel to the country, which currently include such items as business dealings, to visit family, or to pursue cultural exchange, the WSJ noted, or what is known as people-to-people travel.
Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for Southwest, said the largest U.S. domestic carrier had no immediate plans to offer service to Cuba, but called it “a good future opportunity”. In total, the airline will operate around 1,200 charter flights to Cuba this year.
The airline industry and tourism companies are lobbying the White House for a new travel agreement, according to George Ferguson, a senior aerospace and airline analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.
A bill is pending in the U.S. Senate to remove the travel ban on Americans and a more ambitious measure to rescind the decades-old U.S. economic embargo.
In this photo offered by the Florida Keys News source Bureau, Key West Dec. 30, 2013: Mayor Craig Cates, right, waves goodbye as he boards a chartered aircraft at Key West international Airport in that flew to Havana, Cuba.
“We are interested in providing scheduled service from multiple U.S. cities as soon as legally permitted”, she said. “We have built experience operating in Cuba with our charter program to help us be ready to go with scheduled service once legally permitted”.
He is taking the same posture with Cuba as he has with Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal, the newspaper reports, hoping “the initiatives will become so embedded in American policy over Mr. Obama’s final 18 months in office that undoing them would be too difficult”.