The cancellation of Monday’s late afternoon JetBlue flight from St. Thomas’s Cyril E. King Airport to San Juan affected 87 passengers, JetBlue spokesman Sharon Jones said Tuesday.
“It was a maintenance issue,” Jones said, adding that JetBlue flew the passengers out Tuesday morning on a special flight.
Tourism Department spokesman Allegra Kean-Moorehead said that about half the passengers on the flight were local residents.
The flight was slated to leave at 4:51 p.m., Jones said. The flight was cancelled at 8:23 p.m., and the passengers were sent to hotels at JetBlue’s expense and given vouchers for meals and transportation.
To help compensate for their inconvenience, Jones said they were also given vouchers for future round trip travel.
V.I. Port Authority spokesman Monifa Marrero said that the food and drink concessions at the airport remained open until the passengers left the terminal.
Jones and Kean-Moorehead both said canceled flights were rare occurrences.
The person who emailed the Source to complain about Monday’s JetBlue cancellation said that there appeared to be no coordination between the Port Authority and the Tourism Department when it came to dealing with stranded passengers.
“JetBlue had everything under control,” Kean-Moorehead said.
However, she said, there were complaints from a few passengers because they weren’t put up at the Ritz Carlton-St. Thomas or Marriott Frenchman’s Reef Beach Resort. Instead they were sent to hotels like Best Western Emerald Beach Hotel.
According to Kean-Moorehead, Tourism’s help is usually needed during the busy winter season when hotel rooms are scarce. Since it’s still the slow season, JetBlue was able to locate sufficient rooms without Tourism’s help.
