Q TRAVEL — While the ultra-low-cost airline and the flag carrier of the Dominican Republic, Arajet, already serves Costa Rica, Toronto, and Montreal in Canada, the US is a missing part of its network.
Atajet operations began on September 15, 2022, amid the pandemic, with a flight to Barranquilla, Colombia.
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Eighteen months later, the carrier is expected to have started flying to the US by now, according to Nacim Yala, Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer.
Yala says the plans for the airline is quite simple. Like Panama’s Copa Airlines, it is more or less about linking the north with the south over its Santo Domingo ‘hub’.
The route map for this coming summer has 16 daily departures from Santo Domingo with its nine-strong fleet of two-class, 185-seat Boeing 737 MAX 8s. Its longest route, to Buenos Aires, covers 6,010 km.
Passengers on Arajet can easily connect to/from Cancun, Guatemala City, Mexico City, San Jose (Costa Rica), San Salvador, and Canada. But not the US.
Yala said he had anticipated that the U.S. would be served at or about launch time in 2022. However, the airline didn’t apply to the US Department of Transportation for approval until March 2023.
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Yala is hopeful that Arajet can finally begin flying to the US in 2024 and that US open skies may materialize.
“Not being able to go there – and knowing that around 60% of Dominican travel goes to the US – is painful for us. We can survive it, but we’re like a sprinter waiting on the starting blocks, ready for the gun to go off.
“It’s no secret that New York and Miami are hugely relevant [to us], but we don’t plan on stopping there. The benefit of a connecting hub is that you can start aggregating small sources of traffic into the hub and distributing it. So, we’ll definitely go to smaller cities in the US, but which ones remains the question,” said Yala.
About 2.4 million Dominican Americans live in the US, especially in Miami and New York.
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