Bienvenido a Jacó Bay

Delta Air Lines has added two direct flights from New York to Juan Santamaría Airport in San José and Daniel Oduber in Liberia.

The new nonstop flight from John F. Kennedy Airport to San José will operate five times each week and the nonstop flight to Liberia twice weekly — on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

“With these new flights we will have more than 30 flights weekly into Costa Rica,” said Damaris Fallas, District Sales Manager for Delta.

“That means on a weekly basis we will be moving more than 10,000 passengers into both San José and Liberia,” she said.

However, it also means Delta will now be going head to head with Continental Airlines, its chief competitor into Daniel Oduber International Airport. Continental already has a direct flight from Newark to Liberia, and last year moved more than 12,000 passengers on that route.

The New York route is key for two reasons. First, it remains a popular origin for passengers visiting Costa Rica, but perhaps more important, it is a major transit point for European passengers coming to Central America.

Both Delta and Continental have an alliance with Air France, Alitalia and KLM.

“This is a good opportunity for us, and we have calculated that (the European market) with our passengers coming to Costa Rica,” said Ms Fallas.

Last year Continental flew 120,005 passengers in and out of Liberia Airport from Houston and Newark — just 552 passengers more than Delta. But Delta, which pioneered direct flights to Liberia in December of 2002, now has three ports of origin — Atlanta, Los Angeles and now New York.

Between them the two airlines accounted for 68 per cent of all international passenger traffic through Guanacaste.

American Airlines, flying out of Dallas and Miami, carried nearly 86,000 passengers.

Delta’s new routes are part of a $50 million expansion plan from JFK Airport to Latin America and the Caribbean which includes Panama City, Guatemala City, and the Port of Spain.

“Between June of 2006 and February of 2008, Delta Airlines will have added nine destinations between New York and Latin America and the Caribbean, which is the most extensive and unique expansion by a US airline,” said Miguel López, Delta’s Regional Director of Sales. A total of 405,950 international passengers went through Daniel Oduber last year, which was an increase of ten per cent on the previous year.

Aviation officials are again hoping for a ten per cent increase in passenger traffic, but early indications are that might be optimistic. Last month, 47,618 international passengers used the airport, but that was just a seven per cent increase on the year before.

January is traditionally a strong indicator of how the year will go. Tourism chiefs are looking for another 47,000 passengers in February, rising to nearly 56,000 passengers in March.

There are currently 40 international flights arriving each week into Liberia airport — nine of them between 11:45am and 2:30pm on Saturdays — stretching airport facilities to the maximum.

The Ministry of Public Works and Transport is currently assessing tenders by national and international consortiums bidding for the right to upgrade and operate the airport under a concession agreement.

The tender document, released in November last year, makes formal the Costa Rica Board of Civil Aviation’s new guidelines which call for the $20 million airport terminal to now be two stories high, and include four covered air bridges, or jet ways, to board and unload passengers.