Airliners Continue to Add Costa Rica Flights
Thursday, February 21st, 2008While the Liberia and San Jose airport renovations continue to lag, new airlines are continuing to jump on the band wagon to get a piece of the tourism action, destination: Costa Rica. With tourists flooding in from new destinations such as Denver, Colombia and northern Panama, the question is, can the country’s infrastructure sustain them all?
The newest arrival, Taca’s regional branch SANSA airlines, just inaugurated a new route from San Jose, Costa Rica to David, in the Chiriqui province of Panama this week. The new flights will depart Costa Rica on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sundays at 12:20 in the afternoon, with capacity for 48 passengers.
The goal of the new route is to facilitate business trips and increase investment and tourism in both nations. The Costa Rican Institute of Tourism estimated that about 50,000 Panamanians visit Costa Rica yearly, with an even split between business and pleasure travelers.
The new flights should help this number to rise, and allow businesses to spread beyond the border, as part of an initiative to promote cooperation between Central American countries through commercial bonds and the reciprocal exchange of tourists.
Over the weekend Delta Airlines inaugurated two new routes from New York’s JFK airport to the Juan Santamaría airport in San Jose and the Daniel Oduber airport in Liberia.
The San Jose flight will operate every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, while the Liberia route will operate on Wednesdays and Saturdays. These are the last of nine new flights between New York and Latin American and the Caribbean that were added by the airline since June 2006 in its largest expansion ever. Delta now offers 31 flights to Costa Rica per week, with the other flights from Los Angeles’ LAX and Atlanta airports.
Another low-cost airliner ATA also announced its plans to start running a direct flight between Miami and San Jose, as well as Guatemala City, on March 15th. The flights are already on sale and for $250 round trip with taxes. The airline has promised to provide food, movies, music and drinks onboard.
The flights will depart San Jose at 5:55pm and arrive at 10pm in Miami, and can hold up to 160 passengers. Current competition running direct flights from Miami to San Jose include American Airlines and Taca.
Last year saw a number of other international airliners inaugurating flights to Costa Rica, including Spirit Air and Frontier Airlines’ direct flight between Denver and San Jose, all of which are driving down prices to fly to the region. The majority of the new competition is directing flights through the Juan Santamaria International Airport, leaving a price gap between flights to San Jose and Liberia, which were previously available at a similar cost. The new Delta flight should help raise competition for flights to Liberia and hopefully drive those prices down as well.
