BWIA Grants 3-Month Ease
Tickets In G$
TRINIDAD and Tobago’s BWIA says Guyanese can take advantage of its recently implemented programme to offer tickets to the Caribbean in Guyana dollars, Area Manager Dawn Murray announced last week.
The airline, the region’s largest, had been granted special permission to sell its tickets in US dollars only because it was piling up a huge amount of local currency which could not be repatriated to its headquarters in the twin-island republic.
The manager also said the airline would sell tickets on all its routes in Guyana dollars if the Bank of Guyana allows it to repatriate profits.
“It is an experiment to see what will happen. If the Central Bank can release money on a week by week basis or in total, we would resume sales in G$ from the next day,” Murray told Stabroek News.
Government’s granting of special dispensation to BWIA early last year resulted in similar requests from several airlines interested in resuming or commencing services to Guyana, but so far none has been dealt with similarly.
Other sources say that BWIA apparently needs some G$ to service the local end of its operations and this is another reason for the move.
The airline had hinted it would have had to severely scale down operations here had it not been allowed to earn some hard currency.
The offer, which lasts until the end of March in the first instance, has already been snapped up by businessmen and traders.