Flights to Jamaica to start Thursday at Bradley airport
WINDSOR LOCKS — On Thursday, a long-awaited route will finally launch at Connecticut’s flagship airport.
Dec. 15 will mark the start of Spirit Airlines’ flights between Windsor Locks-based Bradley International Airport and Montego Bay, Jamaica. Taking about four hours, flights will operate in both directions on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. During the route’s first few weeks, flights out of Bradley will take off at 7:40 a.m. or 8 a.m., while those from Montego Bay will depart at about 1 p.m. — with one-way fares as low as $116, according to Spirit’s website. The route to Montego Bay, one of the Caribbean region’s top resort destinations, fulfills longstanding efforts to establish nonstop service between Connecticut and the island, to support the state’s large JamaicanAmerican community and boost tourism and trade. There are more than 56,000 residents with Jamaican ancestry in Connecticut, according to Census data — and Connecticut ranks No. 5 in that category among U.S. states.
“The West Indian community is the largest population of foreign-born immigrants in our state, and the fifth-largest in the U.S.,” state Treasurer Shawn Wooden, also a member of the board of the Connecticut Airport Authority, which owns and operates Bradley, said in September. “We want to ensure that our partnership with the islands remains strong. It’s my job to evaluate long-term investment strategy, and I can tell you that the state’s support in this effort is a good investment to enhance our commerce, our communities, and our cultural ties.”
For Spirit, the Montego Bay service will complement its existing routes between Bradley and the Florida cities of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, as well as Myrtle Beach, S.C.
To help establish nonstop service to Jamaica, an allocation of $2 million was included in the state budget. As a result, the state Department of Economic and Community
Development would provide Spirit reimbursements of up to $2 million during a two year-period if the route generates lowerthan-expected revenues.
The nearest airports for Connecticut residents who wanted to fly nonstop to Jamaica — to either Montego Bay or Kingston — had been John F. Kennedy International, Newark Liberty International or Boston Logan International. Passengers flying from Bradley had to stop over at another airport to catch a connecting flight.
Highlighting the demand for nonstop service, the Bradley “catchment area” had been generating about 94,000 Jamaica trips annually, Kevin Dillon, executive director of the Connecticut Airport Authority, said in March 2021. From that total, about 35,000 involved Bradley on “a connecting basis,” with about 28,000 flying to Montego Bay and the other 7,000 going to Kingston.
A few other international routes also operate out of Bradley. Last June, Air Canada restarted flights between Bradley and Toronto Pearson International Airport, a route that had been suspended since the spring of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March, Aer Lingus will resume flights between Bradley and Dublin.
Cancún is the other international destination with nonstop flights to and from Bradley. Delta, Frontier and JetBlue are the airlines that fly between Bradley and the popular destination on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Meanwhile, Bradley continues to grow its domestic service. Among those additions, the new Breeze Airways announced in February that it would establish an operations base at Bradley, with plans to create more than 200 jobs and launch several routes at the airport.
In the first nine months of 2022, about 4.3 million travelers passed through Bradley — jumping 33 percent from the same period in 2021, but down 16 percent from the same timeframe in 2019, according to CAA data.