Caribbean Inter-regional Travel Research Findings
One of the most unknown (or under-utilized) aspects of Caribbean travel is inter-regional air travel or Island hopping.
Although it is not as easy as grabbing your smartphone and booking your next trip from Tortola to San Juan, it can still be done with some due diligence.
Inter-regional travel has its limitations due to disagreements between Caribbean nations, placing extra security steps and travel fees every time a person moves from one island to the next.
Regardless of these extra hurdles, many airlines continue to grow, offering more and more travel gates in and out the region.
One of the fast growing airlines is Seaborne: based out of Puerto Rico and the largest regional airline. They are cutting deals with larger US airlines like JetBlue, American, Delta and United as the sole subsidiary to connect all flights arriving in Puerto Rico to the rest of the Caribbean.
With this background in mind, we decided to gauge incidence and awareness of American inter-regional {Caribbean} travel. Here is what we found:
While up-take has not been strong, with about 47% of Caribbean travelers having flown an inter-regional jet, interest in island-hopping is high! Just about 70% of Caribbean travelers would be interested in learning more about this type of flight… or flying this airline!
Another aspect of inter regional air travel is that you may be able to fly on a Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter turboprop plane… ahem…or a seaplane. Yes! a seaplane.
If you ask me, a seaplane sounds like a cool idea, but how many people have actually flown in one, how many people know it is possible to fly one or if presented with the possibility, would they even get into one. So, we went ahead and asked those very same questions.
Here is what we found.
For the Caribbean travelers here are some of the highlights.
