Cuba clampdown: Trump promises ‘tougher response’ as airlines CANCEL flights to Havana

Alaska Airlines’ Los Angeles to Havana service will be discontinued from January 22, around a year of flight route was started.

Several other US airlines have ended or reduced their services to Cuba, including American, Southwest, Spirit, Frontier and Silver Airways.

The Trump administration last week unveiled new travel regulations which make it tougher for Americans to travel to Cuba despite hundreds of thousands of US tourist flocking to the island nation.

By the end of May 2017, the number of US tourists travelling to Cuba had reached almost 285,000, surpassing the total for 2016.

The new travel rules will still allow legal avenues for travel to Cuba but are seen as Donald Trump making good on an earlier pledge to roll Barack Obama’s move toward warmer ties with Havana.

The regulations include a ban on Americans doing business with around 180 Cuban government entities and tourism companies.

Two years before he left office, Obama had taken the dramatic step of renewing ties with Cuba after half a century of hostility.

The former US president’s pledge saw US hotel chains sign deals and airlines and cruise ships scheduled dozens of tours to Havana and other Cuban cities.

But in June the US President announced he was “cancelling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba”.

Cuba and the US also reopened embassies in each other’s capital, renewing diplomatic missions that had been shuttered in 1961 during the dictatorship of Fidel Castro and later the Cuban Missile Crisis – which experts claim came close to an all out nuclear war.

Alaskan Airlines said it will redeploy the aircraft to other markets with stronger demand.

The company added that passengers who have tickets booked to Havana after January 22 will be rebooked on another airline at no additional cost or offered a full refund.

Airline spokeswoman Bobbie Egan also said that after a slow start in January — the Los Angeles-Havana flights were barely half-full — the airline was selling about 85 percent of the seats on average by April.

She added that demand had remained strong through the summer “but from there we saw softer bookings in the fall (autumn)”.