Philipsburg:--- The Managing Director of Windward Islands Airlines Edwin Hodge responded to an article that was posted on SMN News earlier this week. Below is the letter:Management took notice of the article on your website published on Thursday December 16, 2010.
As the managing Director, part of my duty is to travel for business meetings and to attend certain conferences, hence said trips are justified. I do not travel first class or stay in the luxurious hotels. Moreover, for the traveling I mainly use company business tickets with the airlines we have agreements with, solely for the purpose to keep cost as low as possible.
WINAIR's financial performance has been poor for quite some time, which is due to low fares and high operating cost which is known to all. Further to the high operating cost, no one is mentioning that is we hadn't raise the employee salaries to a standard they should be, we could have been profitable and not able to maintain employees. Management had no help from its owners and consequently made decisions, such as reducing destinations and again increasing same, to improve the company's financial performance, however this did not materialize positively.
With regards to the victimization and discrimination, this is absolutely not true. No matter who the employee is they are permitted to speak their mind. I would have had several entities on my case if this was indeed the case. However, I must say that of course management cannot and will not please all the employees all the time. If I was pleasing everybody then it is prudent to say that all employees have their way, be it that they are wrong or right.
Concerning the pilots, this is also far from the truth; hence I strongly believe this is also manufactured by a disgruntled pilot or another employee.
Routes: WINAIR has grown to 11 destinations over a period of 50 years, some routes more successful than others, but with competition and the general economic conditions in particular periods, WINAIR has decided to cancel certain routes and consequently restart same if necessary. However, this is not done in an ad-hoc manner. This is done taken the traveling public into consideration. Based on the advice from a consultant hired by the Dutch Government and follow up discussions, WINAIR shall cut back on the new routes, Montserrat and Barbuda.
Regarding the Prime Minister's comments, the company needs restructuring but this is not only now. It has been a long time in the making that WINAIR needs restructuring; hence there is a mandate from, the new owners to definitely restructure the company to make it stringer and consequently expand or work with a larger group to keep cost as low as reasonably possible. What this means? Could be several ways, but it is too early to elaborate as the committee is not yet finished with their plans.
Management is doing everything in it power to improve the company's performance.
