Reality check on trip to India for CAL director

CAL Director,  Pandit Abhedanand Persad Sharma

The Trinidad Guardian reported on Wednesday that Caribbean Airlines (CAL) has spent over a quarter-million dollars to fly one its directors — Abhedanand Persad Sharma and his wife, Lisa Ramnarine-Persad — to India to accompany Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar on her trip. 

The paper said it understands "CAL footed bills for the first class airfare, which averaged about TT$250,000."

However, JYOTI checked with travel sources, including airfares on the Internet and found that first class travel from Port of Spain to New York and then on to New Delhi does not cost anywhere near that figure.

Here's what we found using dates as close as possible to the time of travel cited by the Guardian:

Since Sharma is a director of Caribbean Airlines the assumption is that he would travel at no real cost. Also, he would likely be entitled to significant discounts on other international carriers.

However, assuming that he and his wife were to be billed the full fare on the highest ticket to New York, the total cost would be around US$2,970.40, inclusive of taxes and fees.  That, according to today's currency rate, would be TT$18,980.86.

We checked the highest fare from Kennedy airport to Indira Gandhi Airport in New Delhi on Air India and found the full all inclusive cost of two first class seats to be $22,661.60.

The full round trip at the highest first class rates available show that the full trip would have cost around US$25,632, which is TT$162,723.20 using an international currency converter at today's rate.

Since the travel dates used for this research would not be the same as the travel dates for the couple, we accept that the figures would be plus or minus a few dollars. Even if it were thousands, we believe that the figure of TT$250,000 quoted by the guardian is way off target.

From our calculation the Guardian figure is about TT$87,000 off.

The Guardian story said CAL Chairman George Nicholas confirmed that he approved the trip for Sharma, who was not included in the official delegation with the PM to India. His trip to India, according to the Guardian is to deal with CAL's business, although the headline on the story is CAL SENDS PUNDIT TO JOIN PM.