Cuba Travel Services will no longer provide its once-a-week charter service from Los Angeles to Havana partly because of U.S. government delays in processing applications for tour operators visiting the island republic, The Los Angeles Times reported. The last such flight left Los Angeles on Tuesday and returned from Havana on Wednesday.
"Some clients haven't had licenses renewed and others are waiting for new ones," Cuba Travel Services general manager Michael Zuccato told The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, of the tour operators he works with.
The company, which began the charter service in 2000, projected a 40 percent drop in passengers from Los Angeles to Cuba this year, The Los Angeles Times reported. Cuba Travel Services continues to operate a charter between Miami and Cuba, with 10 flights weekly, which relies mainly on family visits to the island. But in Los Angeles, the flights depend on organized tours, according to The Los Angeles Times - and a wide range of licensed passenger types, such as educational and people-to-people exchange travelers, according to a press release.
The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control oversees licenses for the educational and people-to-people trips - and president Obama eased regulations for those trips two years ago - but the regulations tightened again in May when Marco Rubio (R-Fla) complained about the operators' "rampant abuses" and frivolous itineraries, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Cuba Travel Services told The Los Angeles Times that it is "consistently" processing people-to-people applications, and since 2011, it has issued more than 200 to people and individuals.
"Processing any license application, regardless of its eventual disposition, can require significant processing time due to a variety of factors," John Sullivan, spokesman for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, told The Los Angeles Times. "Our goal is to process all Cuba travel applications in a timely and fair manner."
Restoring service to L.A. or beginning service in another West Coast city is not out of the question for Cuba Travel Services.
"It's a great market," Zuccato told The Los Angeles Times. "But we're going to wait until things change with the way licenses are issued."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
