Haiti is largely ungoverned and ungovernable at present, with gangs engaged in killings, firebombing and kidnapping to an extreme degree. As a result nobody wants to fly to Haiti. Everyone wants to fly out of Haiti. And that’s making airline service to Port-au-Prince challenging. In fact it is 8 to 24 times as much to buy a ticket out of Haiti as it does to buy a flight to go there. The route is a mere 713 miles.
American Airlines has downgauged its Miami service from a Boeing 737 to an Airbus 319, losing 25% of the seats on offer. They’re further reducing service from daily to six times a week. Meanwhile there are no seats available on flights from Port-au-Price to South Florida on JetBlue or Spirit over the next couple of weeks.
It’s generally more expensive for Americans to fly to Europe than for Europeans to fly to the United States. There are other routes where demand is almost all one-sided – Americans fly to Cuba but very few Cubans can fly to America. But it’s certainly possible that flying between the U.S. and Haiti has the greatest divergence in one-way ticket pricing of any route in the world?
Stil don’t understand why @AmericanAir is charging $3,400 one way from Pap to Miami when computer shows seats still available. #Haiti pic.twitter.com/lR4L7KEyTi
— Jacqueline Charles (@Jacquiecharles) April 17, 2023
Bear in mind:
- Seat maps are not indicators of how many unsold seats there are, just how many seats haven’t been assigned. Departures from Haiti are likely to have a lot of bookings without seat assignments. (If American could sell planes full of tickets at $3000 one way they wouldn’t be switching to smaller aircraft and cutting back on the number of flights.)
- Last seats available are costly.
- And all seats out of Haiti are going to be pricy when the only purchases are out of Haiti. They’re basically flying empty(ish) planes to Haiti in order to fly full planes back. Yields out of Haiti need to be high enough to justify that. They aren’t really which is why you’re seeing smaller planes and less frequent service.
According to Haiti’s tourism minister,
The [American Airlines] representative, she said, informed her that the airlines needed the Boeing 737-800 for long haul destinations and therefore replaced it with the smaller AirBus.
“As a result, the company increased the prices in proportion to high demands from Haiti. That is not fair to the potential tourists,” she said.
American Airlines isn’t flying Boeing 737-800s long haul and ‘needing the plane on another route’ is saying they can make more money operating the plane on another route – undercutting the argument that the airline is charging too much to fly out of Haiti. They aren’t making enough at the current prices charged to even sustain the service compared to flying the plane somewhere else.
Savvy travelers do have another way out. There are as many as 5 regional jet flights a day, though, from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo and seats to the Dominican Republic are cheaper and still available. From there it’s much less expensive to fly to Miami. Another option would be to fly to Providenciales in Turks and Caicos. It should be possible for Haitians to transit both places without a visa.
Haiti’s problems are often blamed on French colonialism and reparations taken by France after the country’s independence. But those were expunged in 1947. What’s striking is the economic divergence of Haiti and the Dominican Republic starting in the 1960s. The two countries started the period with a similar standard of living. The D.R.’s has grown eight-fold, while Haiti’s has not improved in 70 years. That’s suggestive, at least, that Haiti’s problems are home-grown including massive corruption. Disney used to manufacture there! It was largely replaced by the drug trade.
Wow! I am an ob/gyn at a nonprofit hospital in a large midwest city. This explains why so many of our Haitian patients have had kids in Mexico, and parts of Central and cough America before arriving here.
Gary, I’d encourage you to look into Haiti’s history a little more before tou discount the negative effects of French colonialism on their problems. The French made Haiti pay reparations to the plantation/slave holders after their revolution.. they just finished paying that debt off in 2018 I believe.
So on top of the corruption and other problems in Haiti, that massive debt that was a dorect result of colonialism played a huge role in why there is a stark divergence in how the two countries sharing the same island ended up having wildly different economies.
@Denise – payments ceased in 1947. The French expunged the law which demanded those payments in 2016.
I’m not suggesting the payments weren’t harmful, although counterfactuals can be challenging. What I’m saying is that after the payments, Haiti and the Dominican Republic were equally wealthy. And what happened since then isn’t the result of those payments.
LOL it reminds me of the line from the song Hellacious Acres from the movie A Star is Born (1976).
Admissions free, you pay to get out!
Good song!
Like it or not, Haiti was much better under the Duvalier’s both father and son.
The Clinton family seems to have done very well in Haiti. Maybe the Haitians should ask them what their secret sauce was?
Denise I would encourage you to get your facts straight. Those payments ended decades ago. Haiti is rife with corruption and ruled by gangs and syndicates. Nothing to do with the French.
Airlines’ practice of selling tickets without seat assignments is perplexing to me. Why not give each ticket a provisional seat assignment?
@Denise, you’re just flat out wrong (hopefully blissfully misinformed versus willfully spreading misinformation). Gary obviously researched the actual facts (which are not that difficult to look up, so I’d suggest you do the same before commenting again).
99% of Haiti’s problems are self inflicted from corruption, crime, and greed over the past 70 years. As easy as it is to blame the French for the current issues (and I am far from a fan of them), they have very little too do with it.
It didn’t take long for John to bring racism in; apparently he never heard of any of the great African civilizations like Meroe or Ghana. But then I’m sure a Japanese or Chinese, probably an Indian or Arab too, could make a good case that the white skinned of Europe were living in mud huts when the ancestors of these darker people had brilliant civilizations Or perhaps he thought the Haitian slaves were better off living like Gulag prisoners. In any case, an easier way out of Haiti might be just to take the bus to Santo Domingo. I did that to visit Cap Haitian and it was a simple and interesting trip there and back–not that I’d do it today. Haiti has been a mess for 200 years, but the U.S. occupation in the 1920s, murdering those opposed to corporate interests under the guise of “killing bandits” (today it would be “terrorists”) didn’t help either. Neither did its later support for the murderous Duvalier family which crushed all dissent and independence among the people. And neither have earthquakes, hurricanes or the UN bringing in cholera.
The racism by John is atrocious. Not to mention the abject misunderstanding of “blood.” There are eight different blood types indicated by letter and sign. There is no such thing as “White” blood. I’m disgusted at the ignorance and racism that John has posted.
I just retired from an airline and I worked in Haiti after the major earthquake in 20 years ago now. It was a hell hole then and still is now. Amazing how this exists 700 miles south of Florida. You would be shell shocked if you went there. AA used to have 4 daily MIA-PAP flights and one on a 763.
So sad, and sad for the people of Haiti whom are mostly good people.
They have a Minister of Tourism? That’s the funniest I’ve heard lately.
I live in Haiti. It is not a hellhole. Many people here are kind and very hard-working. One of the problems here is that there are many many guns in Port-au-Prince. Where did they come from? It is illegal to manufacture weapons in Haiti. So all of these weapons are trafficked. A recent UN report found that 100 per cent of the guns in Haiti came from the United States. Many of the country’s problems are self-inflicted, as many of the problems in the US, Canada, France and any other country are seld-inflicted. But it doesn’t help when you have a giant neighbor that is sending weapons. Other things like destroying the country’s rice and sugar industries didn’t help either.
Gary, I recommend you read ‘Why Nations Fail’ by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
A wonderful book which helps piece together why countries which are seemingly similar (island nation, geography, climate, etc) can take such divergent turns