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Caribbean Air­lines (CAL), the re­gion’s largest car­ri­er, will sus­pend two re­cent­ly opened routes and sus­pend its Bar­ba­dos base of op­er­a­tions ear­ly next year, deal­ing a blow to re­gion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Ef­fec­tive Jan­u­ary 10, the air­line will sus­pend its routes to San Juan, Puer­to Ri­co, and Tor­to­la, British Vir­gin Is­lands. CAL will al­so sus­pend its base op­er­a­tions at Bar­ba­dos’ Grant­ley Adams In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in Feb­ru­ary 2026. Flights orig­i­nat­ing out of Bar­ba­dos will be resched­uled and re­timed to op­er­ate out of Trinidad’s Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port in­stead. As a re­sult, all crews based in Bar­ba­dos will be re­quired to op­er­ate flights out of the Port of Spain hub.

In an in­ter­nal memo to staff, seen by Guardian Me­dia, the com­pa­ny said the move was part of an “on­go­ing net­work op­ti­miza­tion pro­gram, which in­volves con­tin­u­ous eval­u­a­tion of routes to en­sure the sus­tain­abil­i­ty and ef­fi­cien­cy of op­er­a­tions across its net­work.”

This is the fourth route CAL’s man­age­ment has ei­ther cut or sus­pend­ed since the in­stal­la­tion of a new board head­ed by chair­man Rey­na Kow­lessar. On No­vem­ber 2, the air­line dis­con­tin­ued ser­vices con­nect­ing Ja­maica (Kingston and Mon­tego Bay) with Fort Laud­erdale, Flori­da. Like the Ja­maica-Flori­da routes, sources tell Guardian Me­dia the Puer­to Ri­co and BVI routes have suf­fered from poor load fac­tors.