It’s been a bumpy few months for the reputation of the troubled regional airline LIAT.

Never perceived to be a model of efficiency, the airline’s image has taken a severe beating in recent weeks. Last month a satirical letter describing LIAT’s service written by Virgin Islands resident Arthur Hicks made international headlines after it was posted on Sir Richard Branson’s blog.

Then in early August, dissatisfied customers created a Facebook page titled “Hold LIAT Accountable.” The page, which features a parody of the airline’s logo with the tagline “late all the time,” quickly generated over 1,200 “likes.”

The airline has claimed recently that its worst days soon will be behind it once several of its older Dash-8 planes are replaced by newer ATR-72s.

But over the past weekend, the demands caused by the transition to the new planes, heavy passenger traffic and striking workers led to widespread delays and flight cancellations.

“This combination of factors has resulted in significant challenges for the company, exacerbated by the grounding of one of the company’s new ATR aircraft in Barbados yesterday as a result of a technical issue,” LIAT stated in a Monday press release.

Fleet re-fitting

At a ceremony held Friday to celebrate the airline’s $65 million loan from the Caribbean Development Bank to buy new planes, LIAT Chairman Jean Holder said that the “re-fleeting exercise” will help ease longstanding customer complaints about LIAT’s performance.

“By 2012 the frequent breakdown of the existing 20-year-old LIAT aircraft had made it difficult to fulfill the demands of a schedule which was designed in response to the demands for service requested by Caribbean countries,” he said.

For many customers, though, the transition period has not gone well.

Sophie Leroy, a Virgin Islands resident returning to the territory from Dominica, was supposed to have left the country on a 2 p.m. flight on Saturday, arriving in the VI by about 6 p.m. Instead, when she showed up early, she found a crowd of distressed passengers gathered in the terminal, and there was no clear indication of what was going on, she said.

“Someone finally piped up and said, ‘Good luck getting on your flight: Everything’s overbooked,’” Ms. Leroy said.

Overbooking

When she reached the airline’s desk, an employee confirmed the overbooking.

“I asked him, ‘Well, what are my options?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know,’” she said.

Despite hours of waiting and the promise that a plane diverted from Barbados would rescue the group of stranded passengers, no flights were available Saturday, and the airline put passengers up in a hotel and paid for their meals, Ms. Leroy said.

After another series of delays the next day, she finally arrived in the VI after a day’s delay.

“I’ve flown them over the years, and over the years I’ve seen them get progressively worse,” she said, adding that the troubles were an unwelcome end to her eight-day vacation in Dominica. “In all honesty it made me forget I had such a great vacation.”

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