New Leisure Routes from April 2017 including Varadero

Great news as it saves me flying into the chaos of Havana

https://blog.virgin-atlantic.com/varadero/

Very good news indeed, lots of new routes being added lately. Especially pleased to see the increase in service from BFS, must indicate good takeup this year as well.

Yes, always good to see expansion, particularly after all the cuts at LHR.

The leisure routes seem to be thriving which is encouraging as they're what VS is probably best known for. It makes sense to increase frequencies in preparation for the smaller A350s which look all but certain to replace the 747s in the next few years.

Good news, had a very good holiday in Varadero some years back, only put off returning due to the long road journey
from Havana, good to have this back on the radar as future holiday destination.

Varadero airport is also a vast improvement on Havana and the way that baggage sporadically arrives sometimes taking a couple of hours for bags to arrive

It's great to here of more routes, expansion instead of contraction.

I wonder how many more days during the summer next year will we see 5 jumbos sitting at Orlando international. 2 from Gatwick, 2 from Manchester and 1 from either Glasgow or Belfast ( and still no clubhouse )

With the extra flights and now the amounts of passengers transferring from Atlanta, Virgin must be bringing an unbelievable amount of tourists in Florida each year.

It will be interesting to see what they need to do to keep that capacity when / if the new Airbus arrive as I believe they are a bit smaller than the leisure configure 747's

David

Varadero didn't last long. Last flight is early September

Was this always just a seasonal route? If it has indeed been pulled permanently then it's a real shame.

We flew in to Havana at the end of March and flew back from Varadero on April 9th. The VRA-LGW flight was probably only half full but I put this down to it being only the second flight since the launch. I agree about Varadero airport, A much more relaxing experience than the chaos of Havana.

No it was not supposed to be seasonal and the schedule was available through to early next year. They started cancelling flights in October a few months ago and I was booked on one of the remaining ones in October however have been moved onto the HAV flight the following day. It's a great shame as not onky is Varadero airport a lot closer to Jibacoa where I stay but despite being a smaller airport is much nicer and more efficient than Havana. Both flights in April were full and on arrival I was in my taxi 20 minutes after landing. Flying into Havana last October it took two hours for baggage to arrive which is the norm

2 Hour wait for baggage at Havana??? It took me just over an hour just to reach the immigration desk at Havana back in December. Then it was on to baggage reclaim. Shame about VRA being pulled, I would have potentially used it for my next trip to Cuba.

2hrs for us last month too, although immigration wasn't that bad.

I'm sure that there's just one guy who works on baggage at HAV - and he doesn't have a truck.

I've got a booking for march 2018... no notice of it being pulled and it's still available to book online...

Yep, still available to book on Skyscanner, although it's showing as a Saturday flight opposed to the current Sunday one.

There's now flights showing from December through March if you do an exact date search. None show up for the flexible search. There were no flights showing at all at the weekend when both I and CS checked. I know the plan had been to change the schedule from Sunday to Saturday in October. Seems like a fluid situation and one that VS customer services don't even know about