Travel Span continues rapid expansion

Feb 19, 2014 News

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– to hire Guyanese flight attendants

By Dwijendra Rooplall

Travel Span has continued to its operations as a carrier service, once again providing non-stop flights for Guyanese travelling abroad, and in an attempt to eventually be branded as a National Carrier, the company is in the process of hiring 60 Guyanese flight attendants for its aircraft.

Travel Span has been in existence for 20 years, with founder Guyanese Nohar Singh, who is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), at its helm. The company sells tickets on airlines around the world and has offices in Queens, New York and Brooklyn as well as here in Georgetown at Regent Street, and seven offices is Trinidad, where it runs Emerald Travels which has been there for almost fifty years.
So for many years Travel Span has had its own flights but was forced to stop those operations in 2008 when the worldwide recession hit.
Speaking to this publication, Rob Binns, one of Travel Span’s board members, who was the previous Chairman and Chief Executive Office of Global Aviation Holdings Inc., the parent company of World Airways, Inc., North American Airlines, Inc. and other subsidiaries, outlined that the company did flights for a good ten years from 1998 to 2008 and then stopped when the recession occurred because it affected the bookings and fuel costs went up exponentially.
“So we decided we will peel back and live to fight another day and just sell tickets. But now we have come in, we only have really one carrier with non-stop service… We still sell other carriers, even different destinations in the Caribbean, because it’s a large travel group, but then we have our own specific flights which started on December 15th 2013,” said Binns.
He explained that the reason why they wanted to go back into flying is because the fares to travel have “been very high and the public wanted another carrier in the market.”
Binns related that the aircraft has the logo Travel Span on it, however the plane is operated by Vision Airlines based in Las Vegas and with Vision Airlines’ flight attendants. The plane, he said, is provided by Vision, but it’s all their (Travel Span’s) economic risk, “because they are a certified airline they fly at a price and whether we sell 200 seats or we sell one seat we pay the same cost, so we have all the economic risk. They do similar programmes with other groups, they kind of brand separately” he said.
Binns explained that they are using Vision’s 767 wide-body aircraft.
“The thing about a wide-body, it’s not only more comfortable in the Cabin, but it has more room underneath for bags. So you never run out of space for bags, which is a common issue with other carriers… and Vision has four more of the 767s.”
He said that the plane will be travelling nonstop from Georgetown to JFK and back to Georgetown, non-stop to JFK from Port of Spain, and some seasonal flights within the Caribbean as well, in the summertime.
“We are looking at other routes as well; we are doing a lot of analysis on new routes out of Georgetown. Part of this move is to get more embedded in the economy of the company in the country.”
FLIGHT ATTENDANTS
Binns explained that the company plans to replace all of Vision’s flight attendants with local attendants “so what we are doing is interviewing for Guyanese flight attendants, because we want people to think of Travel Span as a National Carrier, a Guyanese Carrier.”
“So the idea going forward is that we want to hire Guyanese flight attendants and I hope people will feel it’s Vision Airlines operating the flight… So it’s a US Airline with all the safety and security of a FAA airline, the flight attendants will be trained in the US for three weeks by Vision Airlines in Las Vegas, which I think they can enjoy,” said Binns.”
Over the weekend, Binns had been interviewing many locals who are desirous of becoming flight attendants.
“Most of the people that we are interviewing here today are University graduates, just graduated within a couple of years, young, who know a little bit more about the world, and it’s fine if they have ambitions in a couple of years to go on and do something different. I think it’s good to have that kind of young fresh look to the aircraft,” he said.
Binns also explained that the persons being shortlisted will be employees of Travel Span Georgetown – paid here in Guyana, but trained by and under the control of Vision Airlines.
“It’s better we think to have Guyanese flight attendants who understand the people; understand the culture, have a bit more Guyanese type of food on board, understand what the needs of the passengers are and reflect the passenger base. We hope that the mixture of this US-certified airline and the brand, on the back of Guyanese flight attendants, will work well.”

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