A private commercial airline by the name of AirOne Ventures Limited may ruffled the wings of regionals carriers when its takes to the skies next year.
Simply because the Irish backed proposed low cost airline company have as one of their 4 shareholders and a director of the said company, Digicel Group Vice-President Leslie Buckley. AirOne Ventures Limited is registered in Jamaica but currently based in Barbados due to Jamaica’s government refusal to grant them a license. A search led to a site advertising vacancies for AirOne Ventures. So does Digicel owned, managed or controlled AirOne Ventures? According to the Jamaica Gleaner, the answer from both sides was a quick no.
………… Airone and Digicel are forming an alliance but last night the latter company moved swiftly to dispel any suggestion that it was an investor in the airline.
“It is an entirely separate legal entity to Digicel Limited,” said group head of communications Maureen Rabbitt.
“Airone Ventures Limited is not owned, controlled or managed by Digicel Limited.”
Pressed on whether the company’s chairman Denis O’Brien was involved with Airone, both Rabbitt and later ProComm, the agency handling media relations for Airone, said ‘no’. – 11/12/07
AirOne Ventures is to begin commercial flights from Barbados to some regional and US destinations between March to April come next year [2009] with fares as low as US$10!!! Now that’s a lot uh money to sustained $10.00 fares. But hey, Digicel have never been known to be weak in the sales & marketing department peoples.
Airone has tapped Digicel for assistance, saying that it would be relying on the savvy mobile phone company for sales support.
Tickets? No problem. They can be purchased and collected lock, stock and barrel at Digicel stores. Or what about receiving them via SMS text message? The barcodes will be scanned at the airport and a boarding pass issued.
Digicel Group is founded by Irish billionaire Dennis O’Brien. The Irish telecom company services 6m subscribers in 23 markets in the Caribbean and Central America with expected revenues to grow to US1.47b at its financial year end March 2008.
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August 20, 2008 at 1:34 pm
[...] With a population of 280,000 that’s nothing compare to Jamaica 2.8m people. In our previous articlewe told you how the Jamaica government refuse to grant a license to AirOne Ventures after [...]