US major American Airlines will introduce the first regular scheduled service between the United States and Cap Haïtien, a city of about 190,000 people on the north coast of Haïti. The new daily flight from Miami will commence from October 2, 2014, subject to government approval, and will be flown using a Boeing 737-800.
The new link will supplement American’s longstanding services to Port-au-Prince in Haïti, the capital and largest city of the Caribbean country with a population of around one million people. The city’s Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport is the main international air gateway into the country with Air France, Air Canada rouge, Air Transat, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines among the operators with regular links to North America.
"We have proudly served Haïti for more than 40 years and believe this new service is important not only for our customers, but also as an important catalyst to develop the north coast and open up this historically significant destination," said Art Torno, senior vice president - Mexico, Caribbean and Latin America, American Airlines.
Cap Haïtien is viewed as a developing leisure destination with the calm water of the bay, picturesque Caribbean beaches, wealth of French colonial architecture and many historic monuments making it a popular resort and holiday destination for Haïti's upper classes. Just along the coast, Labadee, a walled beach resort compound, serves as a stopover point for the cruise ships of Royal Caribbean with the weekly arrivals generating the most significant share of tourist revenues into the country since the mid-1980s.
"We are thrilled that American Airlines has decided to launch the first nonstop service from the United States to Cap-Haitien," said Haitian Prime Minister Laurent S Lamothe. "This new route represents a tremendous opportunity for significant economic impact for our country by connecting Miami directly to the second city of Haiti."
Although this will be the first international air link to be offered by a major US carrier from Hugo Chávez International Airport in Cap Haïtien it will not be the first regular link into the US from the city. In the past ten years flights have been operated by Florida Coastal Airlines and LynxAir International with the last scheduled services to Miami operating in October 2009 and Fort Lauderdale in September 2012 (some smaller operators do provide links to the US, including Haïti national carrier Tortug’Air, but these are flown on a non-scheduled basis).
In our analysis, below, we look in greater detail at passenger demand between Haïti and the United States over the past five years, highlighting the five largest US O&D markets for inbound and outbound passengers from the Caribbean country. According to MIDT data, O&D demand between the country has risen 44.9 per cent since 2009, an average annual rise of 11.2 per cent between 2009 and 2013. American Airlines is the largest operator between the two countries with a 62.8 per cent traffic share in 2013, although this was down from 71.1 per cent in 2009.
Data provided by 
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