FORT LAUDERDALE, Jul 11 2015 – Despite currency woes in Venezuela, a new low-cost airline plans to launch daily flights between Fort Lauderdale and the Venezuelan capital of Caracas starting July 17.
Dynamic International Airways will service the route with a wide-body 767-300ER that can seat 242 passengers, executives said.
Fort Lauderdale has not offered direct service to Venezuela for a decade, so travel leaders are excited.
“We look forward to the new nonstop flight… which will provide Broward County’s large Venezuelan resident population of the opportunity visit friends and family,” said Nicki E. Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.
The launch by a small new airline from Greensboro, N.C. comes after years of large veteran carriers including American, Delta and Lufthansa offering fewer flights to Venezuela.
That’s because international airlines still are owed about $3.7 billion by the Venezuelan government, because they can’t convert the money they get in local bolivar currency into dollars at the rate they were promised. Exchanging bolivares to dollars on the open market would mean huge losses — up to 90 percent in some cases.
Dynamic is not worried by those legacy problems and will accept payment in bolivares, executives said Friday.
The startup sees opportunity on the route because of cutbacks by other carriers and because of the large Venezuelan community in South Florida, including concentrations in Weston and Pembroke Pines.
Dynamic plans to add twice-a-week service from Fort Lauderdale to Venezuela’s western city of Marcaibo later this year, said Pablo I. Antezana, regional commercial director for Latin America.
But aviation analysts see risks.
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Mike Boyd, president of Boyd Group International of Colorado. “With the economic problems in Venezuela, I don’t know why they’d want to put premium service into Venezuela. That’s a lot of machinery for that route.”
Boyd said the problem with U.S.-Venezuelan service is not demand but payment. Some airlines now sell tickets for Venezuela service only in dollars to avoid the exchange rate problems.
Dynamic appears to be the first airline flying between Fort Lauderdale and Caracas since American Airlines operated the route from December 2003 to January 2005, according to Broward County aviation authorities. American, Santa Barbara and others fly between Miami and Venezuela.
The number of Venezuelans in the area has grown exponentially since then. U.S. Census numbers show more than 85,000 people of Venezuelan descent now live in South Florida, triple the number in 1999 when the socialist government first led by Hugo Chavez took power.
Begun in 2008 as a charter operator, Dynamic switched focus after its 2013 purchase by new owners. It recently began its first scheduled service between New York’s Kennedy Airport and Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, the English-making nation next to Venezuela. (SunSentinel)
