notahippie said:Will_L said:
We will see... If not more economical than STT via ferry ..and times are all important ...It had to be cost competitive
This is what I was telling the bride this morning after I read the news. The Next Trip To the BVI spreadsheet shows that is more economical for us to fly to STT and take a ferry over the next day. Yeah, even tacking a single overnight stay in St. Thomas to each end of the vacation to account for ferry times is less expensive than connecting in SJU
Spreadsheets are wonderful...
So land STT, get bags, get taxi, check in hotel, eat, sleep, get up, repack, check out, get taxi, ride to ferry, "do the ferry ticket and wait dance", ferry ride(joy for some, terror for others), customs and immigration tortola, get taxi, ride to destination more than 24 hours after most have left home. That is an awful lot of adventure and hassle for a family to get to Tortola. There is also a bunch of hidden variable costs most leave out of the "ferry dance" spreadsheet.
Direct flight time from NYC(and other cities) to St. Lucia is 4.5 hours.
http://www.moorings.com/destinations/caribbean/st-luciaThe BVI Government needs to work aggressively to address the hassles of ingress and egress. Two choices cut a deal to somehow bypassing the taxi industry with a integrated ferry terminal at STT or get on with a longer runway coupled with subsidized flights following the Bermuda model.
The $7M BVI Air deal is for 86 passenger aircraft or +/-30,000 heads if flown full 365 days a year. Three (3) flights a day would not get you to 100,000 passengers in an out. Tortola needs daily flights from Atlanta, MIA, New York, Charlotte, Chicago, and DC at least. The MIA-BVI Air option will be a boost for some business travel. The flight will be 2.5 hours for the business investment community resident in Miami/Coral Gables. The BVI Air will not be a cheap seat Southwest knockoff business plan.
