Virgin Atlantic is dropping flights to St Lucia and moving Havana to Heathrow
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According to travel trade reports, Virgin Atlantic is to cancel its route to St Lucia from 8th June 2020.
Virgin currently has three flights per week from London Gatwick to St Lucia. One of these slots will be used to increase services to Antigua, which will increase to 4 x weekly.
Selected Antigua services will now carry on to Grenada and Tobago. These routes are currently tagged onto the St Lucia services.
There is an implication in the local press coverage that Virgin Atlantic had demanded explicit or implicit subsidies worth $2.5m from St Lucia in order to continue flights. This could have been, for example, via a payment for a marketing campaign in the UK, or via heavy discounts on landing fees. The Government was unwilling to meet these demands.
There are still nine services per week from the UK to St Lucia. As well as the daily British Airways service, Tui and Thomas Cook each run a weekly service.
It is not clear what is happening to Virgin Atlantic passengers with bookings beyond 8th June but they will presumably be moved to the BA service.
…. and Virgin Atlantic is moving Havana
From the same date, 8th June, Virgin Atlantic is moving its Havana service from London Gatwick to London Heathrow.
The flight will switch to an Airbus A330-300 from an ex-airberlin A330-200, which will see the number of Upper Class seats increase from 19 to 31.
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