Quoting pipeafcr (Reply 54):
Colombia has seen various waves of immigration from Middle Eastern nationals, specially from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan, and even though most of those migrant communities are in the caribbean coast and the Antioquia Department, I am sure that AV or Copa Colombia will be able to offer good connections to MDE, MZL, CTG, BAQ, SMR etc |
The Antioquia department? The "paisa" region (Antioquia+Coffee Region) was famously the only region in Colombia that did not receive any significant migration from the Levant. This comes from the fact that the levantine population found prosperity through commerce, which was underdeveloped in the rest of the country when they arrived en masse during the late XIX and early XX centuries. When they got to Antioquia, they found out they had fierce competitors in the paisas (the people of the paisa region), who were also not very welcoming of foreigners and decided to settle elsewhere. The most prominent community of levantine descendants is in the caribbean coast, with mid sized communities in the Bogotá metro region and Cauca Valley and Santander departments. Smaller but uninterrupted migration flows (most recently from Palestine and Syria) are still coming to Colombia, specially to the Caribbean coast and the capital.
BAQ, CTG,
BOG, SMR, VUP, MTR, CLO, ADZ, CUC and BGA will be putting those VFR butts on the plane.
MDE, MZL or any of the paisa cities will have minuscule input. But this is still a very small group of potential passengers for these flights. Most are third, fourth and fifth generation descendants who have little ties to their motherlands except for some cultural expressions and an ethnic identity (they don't even share islam, as the great majority of arabs in Colombia are maronite christians or second and third generation catholics).
The passengers on these flights will be low-yield tourists and bargain hunters which are
TK's business on these kinds of routes. They make money on that and that's valid, in fact it's welcome.
The only thing that I don't trust about this lfight is the triangle routing via
PTY. It was a disaster for
TP, and while i'm sure
TK's management is actually capable of working to sustain a flight, it might still be hard. The colombian economy has cooled down and won't return to serious growth for a couple of years, so competition will be harsh while passenger numbers are not set to see the explosive increases of recent times.
