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JetBlue Launches Flights to Cuba for $99

The fares from Florida to three Cuban cities are now on sale.
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When six U.S.-based airlines won government approval to begin commercial flights to Cuba in June, it soon turned into a race to see which of the airlines would get its planes off the ground the soonest. It appears that the winner may be JetBlue, which today announced that it would begin flights from its Fort Lauderdale hub to three Cuban cities—Camagüey, Holguín, and Santa Clara—as soon as next month, with tickets now on sale for $99 each way.

On August 31, the Fort Lauderdale-Santa Clara flight will kick off three times a week, then move to daily October 1. The other two routes will begin not long after: Fort Lauderdale-Camagüey will be daily as of November 3, then the Holguín route as of November 10. American Airlines has announced that its first flights to Cuba, two direct routes from Miami to Cienfuegos and Holguín, will debut on September 7. The other four airlines who will be running U.S.-to-Cuba commercial flights are Frontier, Southwest, Sun Country, and Silver Airways. To promote the new routes, JetBlue is pricing fares extremely competitively: Tickets will be $99 each way on all three Florida-Cuba itineraries. That's a significant bargain compared to existing charter flights, which can run closer to $600. It's likely the fares will go back up once the initial round of tickets sell, but it's not certain. Those fares are also lower than the initial rates on American, which begin at $262.

However, simply booking a ticket online will not be enough to arrive in Cuba. Visitors will already need to have obtained a visa, and fall under one of the 12 categories permitted for Americans to travel to Cuba, which include visiting family members, being on a humanitarian mission, or taking part in an educational "people-to-people" tour. Customers on the JetBlue website who try to buy tickets to Cuba will have to fill out the same information (full legal name, address, credit card info) as anyone buying a ticket to any other place, but there will be an additional dropdown field asking them to select which of the 12 categories they are qualified to travel under. Users can begin the visa process right then and there, and can fill out their affidavit paperwork on JetBlue's site without having to go to a separate website in another window. They will have to check a box reading "I certify that my travel to Cuba is authorized under the Cuban Assets Control Regulations and falls within one of the below approved categories" before being able to complete the purchase. (Required documentation for each of the 12 categories varies, and can be found here.) JetBlue has included some ways to make the process easier, such as building the price of Cuban health insurance (a requirement for visiting the island) into the fare. And while the airline normally charges fees for checked bags, that policy will be waived for flights to Cuba, meaning passengers can check a bag that weighs up to 50 lbs. for no additional fee.

Until now, one of the biggest questions surrounding U.S.-Cuba flights was who would land the coveted route to Havana, which was conspicuously absent from the list of approved cities earlier this summer. That question may soon be answered, though: In a release announcing the new flight itineraries, a JetBlue rep added that the airline "will announce a start date and fares for Havana later this year." It's yet not clear if those routes will be direct from the United States or involve transferring in one of the three Cuban cities JetBlue will be adding to its lineup.