While the post-pandemic travel explosion is commonly associated with Europe, other parts of the world have also seen a significant increase in visitors both from the U.S. and other countries.
Travel analytics company ForwardKeys shows that flight bookings to the Dominican Republic are up 14% from 2019 to 2023 while bookings to Costa Rica and Aruba are up 11%. Jamaica and Bahamas are other popular destinations that are seeing significant visitor growth and are set outpace records seen before the pandemic — over the last six months, airlines such as JetBlue (JBLU) and Southwest (LUV) have both announced new routes to the latter's capital of Nassau.
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Tapping into this demand for Latin America and the Caribbean, Fort Worth-based American Airlines (AAL) just announced eight new routes to the region for the sun-seeking season. These include a new daily flight between Miami and La Romana in the Dominican Republic starting on Dec. 5 and a Saturday service to St. Vincent and the Grenadines from Charlotte International Airport from Dec. 7.
American is promising 'nonstop fun in the sun this year'
"Customers will have more reasons to choose American than ever before for nonstop fun in the sun this year," American's SVP of Network And Schedule Planning Brian Znotins said in a statement. "We are excited to continue growing our network to the region with more flights this winter to the Caribbean and Latin America than any other U.S. carrier ever."
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Other new routes announced by American include flights from JFK to three small Caribbean nations — St. Lucia, St. Maarten and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
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Flights to these Caribbean islands will run weekly
A flight between Philadelphia and the Barbados capital of Bridgetown will run once a week on Saturdays starting from Nov. 7 alongside another flight from the city to Costa Rica's Liberia also launching on the same day. All these flights will run on either Boeing 737 (BA) or Airbus 319 (EADSF) planes with the exception of the Philadelphia-Bridgetown route running on the Boeing 737.
American says the new flights increase its flight network to 11% more departures and 10% more seats total when compared to the routes it flew during the same fall and winter season in 2024. It also claims that the new Dominican routes will make it the airline running more flights to the country than any other carrier — a title airlines regularly try to claim in order to carve out a space and stand out from competitors in a given region.
In the winter sun-seeking season, American says it will reach a peak of 2,350 weekly flights to more than 95 destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Tickets for all the new routes will be on sale on American's website starting from May 20. On top of these, American also announced that it will be increasing service on existing popular routes such as Charlotte to Antigua from twice a week to daily and Chicago to Los Cabos, Mexico from weekly to twice-weekly. Many of these routes will go back to their normal schedule or be stopped once the winter period is over.
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