More than two years ago, I asked, who the heck is BermudAir? The airline has actually been flying for more than two years now, and before the holidays I had the chance to talk with the airline’s CEO Adam Scott for the first time. This seemed like a great opportunity to check on the airline, and guess what? It has now spawned a new airline of its own, AnguillAir. Things are going… well? Honestly, it’s hard to know for sure at a private company like this, but at the very least they are keeping quite busy.

BermudAir launched in 2023 with 6x weekly to Boston, 2x daily to Westchester County, and 6x weekly flights to Fort Lauderdale. It started with Embraers in a standard configuration, but it had planned to go to an all-premium model with only 30 business class seats. That never happened. Adam says it was largely an issue of getting the seats certified that prevented this model from coming to fruition, but he says “the opportunity was much bigger than being a boutique airline,” so they never looked back again.

I asked Adam where he got that idea from, was it the data? He said it was “the groundswell of support we had.”

The Bermuda market has always struck me as an interesting one since it is the rare island on this side of the Atlantic that has its peak season in summer. That’s why there’s only seasonal service from the big airlines, but that’s part of why Adam has been so fixated on BermudAir in the first place. He says that the seasonality is not as bad as you might think since 40 percent of the traffic originates in Bermuda and they travel year-round. Though picking the right destinations at the right times matters, and BermudAir has had its struggles.

Adam says the mistakes that were made were “simple” and they have been corrected. He explained that BermudAir stretched itself too thin, especially with marketing. It had picked too many markets and needed more focus to make these work. So, that focus has now come to Halifax, Montréal, Toronto, Boston, New York, and Baltimore. Orlando apparently has done well too. Other markets like Charleston, Raleigh/Durham, and Richmond didn’t work. And original market Fort Lauderdale is gone, though he says that market needed frequency and the schedule they put into place wasn’t “fit for purpose.”

Other markets may have worked had they been done right. Hartford and Providence, for example, hold promise, but he said they made the mistake of flying them on the same days of week they flew Westchester. So that was a problem that bled traffic away.

Even if seasonality isn’t as big of an issue as it seems, winter is still lower than summer. This is where AnguillAir came from. It’s a good way to use an airplane during winter when travel to Anguilla and the rest of the Caribbean is at its peak. The airline has started with 2x weekly to Baltimore, Boston, and Newark. For now, it’s strictly seasonal, but it hopes that eventually it will go year-round.

I was curious to know why they chose Anguilla over the 300 million other Caribbean islands. Adam said it was a combination of factors but ultimately “that has historically been very challenging to get to.” He’s not wrong about that. American does a couple daily flights to Miami, but nothing else comes to the US mainland. Most itineraries require stopping and changing airlines in San Juan or St Thomas. Whether there’s enough demand to support these new AnguillAir nonstops, however, remains to be seen. It’s also not clear how much support the Anguilla government is providing, so that would certainly change the calculus.

Now, remember, I did this interview back in December, and I’m only getting it live now. So at this point the airline should have a lot more data on how Anguilla is looking. There haven’t been any schedule changes that I’ve seen to suggest immediate tweaks were needed. Then again, that could have been a requirement of any government support, assuming there was some.

For now, BermudAir/AnguillAir remains a very small carrier with four airplanes. Adam continues to see big opportunity though. He says that in five years, he expects the fleet will “definitely be greater than 10 and hopefully a lot more than that.” I can’t imagine Bermuda turns into some boom market, but he says he thinks there’s opportunity for it to grow as a winter destination “which it rightfully is.” Plus, he sees “many opportunities in and around the Caribbean but also further afield as well, too small for the big guys.”

Naturally, I ended on the only question that really matters. Are you profitable? His response was a coy, “we’re very comfortable with where we are.” So… not profitable, I’ll assume. But he did have some excuses, saying they needed to invest significantly not only to get the airline going but on things like ground handling in Bermuda which can be a separate source of income if other airlines use them. But in the end, it seems pretty clear this airline is not out of the woods.

I followed up with a question on when he thought the airline will be profitable, and he said “consistent profitability for us is within reach, we’re very confident of that.”