InselAir Asks Government of Curaçao for Emergency Fund

TIN news:  InselAir has approached the Government of Curaçao to ask for an extension of the state aid to help the financially-stricken airline.
Currently, InselAir has a large amount of US dollars stuck in Venezuela. Despite the continued negotiations to retrieve the money, the outstanding amount has created pressure on the organization to the extent that InselAir had to adjust its business operations to remain a financially healthy organization.
InselAir has managed to do so successfully in the past months by thoroughly looking into all aspects of the business including financial, operational, commercial, general affairs and maintenance in order to realize the required costs reduction, increase revenues and overall increase of efficiency.
One of the measures that were taken was a re-organization of its workforce by combining positions, eliminating departments, re-allocating employees and laying-off employees.
To bridge the gap of the outstanding funds InselAir has requested support from the Government of Curaçao by means of an emergency fund which is currently being reviewed by a Committee.

The company says that it has been a profitable airline since its first flight on August 28, 2006.
“InselAir has shown its strength and flexibility to cope with financial challenges related to Venezuela in the past and is doing the same now to ensure a stable organization and to remain a financially healthy and profitable airline while diversifying its markets”, the airline said in a statement.
“This flexibility was noticeable by the fact that InselAir was able to successfully compensate, to a large extent, the decrease of the Venezuelan part of its operations, which went from 35% to 4%, by leveraging from its network expansion conducted in the past months, adding new routes and destinations to its network, such as Port-of-Spain, Barranquilla, Georgetown, Manaus, Havana, San Juan and Quito. In addition, InselAir has increased frequencies to and from Paramaribo, Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo”.
Starting of as a point-to-point carrier InselAir has evolved into a leading carrier with a strong hub on Curacao through which InselAir provides connectivity between Upper South America, the Caribbean and Southeast USA, via Miami. A large scale analysis of the network has been conducted recently in order to increase the efficiency of the network and to provide the connectivity based in the demand of its markets.
Due to specific cost and revenue related measures InselAir has put in place a financial restructure that allows the company to be back to profitability throughout 2017. InselAir will remain one of the largest Caribbean carriers in the region, serving 21 destinations, transporting around 1 million passengers per year and offering 140 city pairs with a current fleet of 14 aircraft.
In the last few weeks KLM and TUIFly Netherlands announced the suspension of their codeshare agreements with InselAir, amid the operational problems at the Caribbean airline.