Swiss airline Edelweiss part of Lufthansa group, reached occupation levels of over 85% in the first nine months operating the direct flight between Zurich and San Jose, Costa Rica, this result has motivated them to increase the number of weekly flights from two to three starting September 30th, 2018. Currently, Edelweiss flies between Costa Rica and Switzerland on Tuesdays and Fridays, as of Se...

Evelop Airlines will begin operating a new route connecting San Jose, Costa Ria to Lisboa, Portugal in April 2018. The airline will fly once a week at first, in a 330-300 plane with capacity for 388 passengers, “We have studied the Costa Rican market, and we believe in this great destination”, stated Diamantino Pereira, chief of Avoris (company that owns Evelop Airlines) in Portugal in an inter...

Officers of the Fiscal Control Police (PCF) and Treasury (Ministerio de Hacienda) seized fake shirts from the Costa Rica National Soccer Team that were for sale at three different stores at the Juan Santamaria Airport. Irving Malespín Muñoz, chief of the Fiscal Control Police, stated that the inspection was done with the help of specialized personnel that confirmed the articles were not origina...

There is still not a specific date to begin the work, but the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation expects to have them ready by May, and has confirmed that as part of the works to extend the road San Jose-San Ramon, changes will be done to the accesses close to the Juan Santamaria Airport in Alajuela. The plan was designed by the General Directorate of Transit Engineering, and will be e...

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) presented a complaint this Wednesday to the General Directorate of Migration in Costa Rica for the delays that have continued to take place at the airport due to the slow migratory control; a situation that started occurring after the new system was implemented just a few months ago. IATA stated that when they received notification that the ne...

New Jersey is the destination of the month at Avianca Airlines; this route which was inaugurated in November by Avianca is being promoted with prices starting at $409.00 roundtrip. Avianca flights leave the Juan Santamaria Airport and arrive at the Newark Airport five days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, flights make a stop in El Salvador. The rate is available for ...

The Judicial Investigative Organism (OIJ) in Costa Rica carried out three searches this Monday, January 8th to collect documents and information related to the airplane accident that took place December 31st in the area of Nandayure, Guanacaste and where 10 tourists died as well as the 2 crew members. The searches were conducted in the offices of Nature in located in the Juan Santamaria Airport an...

The Juan Santamaria International Airport in Costa Rica will increase the number of Migration control counters from 8 to 14 to speed up the process for passengers leaving the country. In the past few months travelers have faced long lines when exiting the country after the new migration system was implemented. In the past passengers filled in a paper form, and the process of checking the pass...

Costa Rica’s General Migration Directorate informed this Saturday that the weather conditions in the United States’ East Coast which caused the cancelation of several flights during the week is now causing heavy aerial traffic in the Juan Santamaria and Daniel Oduber International Airports in Costa Rica, saturating the services and surpassing the airports’ infrastructure capacity. In January 5t...

Costa Rican immigration authorities denied entry this Saturday, December 6 to a Canadian citizen who apparently is part of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. The man, of last name Gallant, was denied entry as he was doing immigration control at the Daniel Oduber International Airport in Liberia, Guanacaste and was sent home in the same flight in which he arrived. According to immigration auth...

“Due to strong winds and whiteout conditions, flights at JFK have been temporarily suspended. Travelers are urged to contact their airline carriers for updates on resumption of service”, the information was posted in the different social media channels by JFK Airport, but prior to this notification, American Airlines, Delta, Avianca, among other airlines had already suspended or canceled their fli...

Avianca Airlines informed of the suspension of several flights to New York and New Jersey due to the winter storm Grayson which is affecting the East Coast of the United States. The press release confirmed that flights leaving from Colombia, Costa Rica and El Salvador to and from New York and New Jersey scheduled for January 3 and 4 and 5 have been cancelled. The airline went through the proc...

Enio Cubillo, director of Civil Aviation and Michael Soto, Chief of Plans and Operations of the Judicial Police in Costa Rica have stated that three elements are being considered as possible causes of the light aircraft crash that occurred on Sunday, December 31 in the mountains of Nandayure, Guanacaste: weather conditions, mechanical problems and human error. “We are not ruling out anything”, s...

The first flight of the South American airline Latam will arrive to Costa Rica on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 from Lima, Peru; this will be the first direct service offered by this company between Costa Rica and Peru. Latam will offer three weekly flights, Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, leaving from the Juan Santamaria International Airport at 4:45 p.m. and arriving in Lima at 9:25 p.m. Flights ...

Morpho Travel, a company o Britt Group opened three new stores at the Juan Santamaria International Airport offering toys, technological items and coffee machines. On December 22 the company opened doors to their toy store Whoops; tech store Plug In, which offers technology “to go” (chargers, headphones, cameras, etc.)and the Britt Espresso store which specializes in coffee machines. Accordi...

A power outage affected the Atlanta Airport, one of the most frequented in the world, for over 11 hours, this caused hundreds of cancelled and rerouted flights and thousands of passengers stranded. In a time of the year when the number of passenger increases considerably the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport suffered an electrical failure at around 1 p.m. Sunday, December 17. The service...

If you like aviation and you’ve always wanted to learn more about it, this Saturday you will get the opportunity at the Open Aviation event that will take place in Hangar 14 of the Tobias Bolaños Airport in Pavas, San José, Costa Rica. This is a free event, but it requires previous registration, it includes conferences covering different topics such as, how to become a pilot, meteorology, p...

Low-cost airline Volaris Costa Rica recently received the temporary permit to operate new routes between the United States and Costa Rica. Volaris Costa Rica currently operates 11 routes from Costa Rica to Guatemala, Mexico (3 cities), Nicaragua and El Salvador and has just been operating for one year in the country. Fernando Naranjo, general manager for Volaris, confirmed that they will be o...

The new digital system used in migration at the international airports in Costa Rica went down today causing long lines in both the Juan Santamaria Airport in Alajuela and the Daniel Oduber in Gunacaste. System failures are also reported in the national airports of Peñas Blancas, Tobias Bolaños in Pavas and Paso Canoas. The process to go through migration right now is being done manually which ...

The Daniel Oduber International Airport in Liberia, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, became as of Friday the first air terminal in Central America to be certified as carbon-neutral. In order to earn the certification the Airport had to first quantify the greenhouse gases that were being generated and then had to elaborate a plan to reduce this number considerably and also recover refrigerant gases. T...

The General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC) saw many weaknesses in the way the Tobias Bolaños Airport is being managed that gave cause to irregularities and many times suspicious activities. So far this year the authorities discovered 27 unauthorized small airplanes in the hangars of the Pavas national airport; also, several cases of airplane owners trying to take fuel from the planes, ...

Costa Rican airport authorities seized a weapon and ammunition from a U.S citizen as he attempted to board an international flight, said the Public Security Ministry. The incident took place at the Juan Santamaría International Airport (SJO) outside of the capital city of San José, Costa Rica. The man had failed to report he was carrying a firearm and ammunition, which are not permitted on f...

The Juan Santamaría International Airport will have a new terminal for domestic flights by March of 2018. According to Rafael Mencía, executive director of Aeris Costa Rica, company that administers the airport, the construction work already began and also includes the construction of a new firefighter station to the south of the main building. The domestic terminal is being constructed as a...

The electronic passport for Costa Rican citizens is a country project that will soon be put up for open tender with the expectation of having it ready by 2020. With this technology migratory procedures will be done almost automatically through smart doors that will have systems to run fingerprints and facial recognition and will avoid having to spend time in long lines at the regular counters. ...

Mexican low-cost airline, Viva Aerobus, will begin operations in Costa Rica starting December 1st with the route San José- Cancún. The route will have initially a frequency of two times a week, Tuesdays and Fridays and only during the high season, with rates starting as low as $150.00. This is part of the expansion plan of Viva Aerobus that is already offering services from Mexico to Los Angele...

If you've ever felt out of your element upon boarding an airplane, imagine how these marine creatures must have felt. A Costa Rican man arrived at the Juan Santamaría International Airport outside of San José, Costa Rica Saturday, November 4 with a dozen or so hermit crabs stashed into two Tupperware containers with holes poked in the top. A failed school science project? Who knows ... Costa...

A U.S. citizen by the last name of Krause, who is on the Interpol alert list for sexual abuse crimes in the United States, was turned back Monday, November 6, 2017 after arriving at the Juan Santamaría International Airport (SJO) outside of San José, Costa Rica. Costa Rican immigration police stationed at the airport saw that Krause's name came up on an Interpol alert list when they did a routi...

Costa Rican migration police at the Juan Santamaría International Airport detained a Mexican man who is one of the suspects of the robberies that occurred last Tuesday, October 31st in two jewelry stores in Escazú. Migration ad interim director, Esteban Obando, confirmed that the alert was given by the new digital system (Migración Visible) on Saturday night and the airport authorities immedia...

A migration officer at the Juan Santamaría International Airport will be subjected to an investigation by her superiors after she allowed one of the suspects in the halloween robberies that took place last Tuesday, October 31, in Escazú, to exit the country. According to the General Direction of Migration and the digital system “Migración Visible” detected the alert in real time; however, for r...

Changes to the migratory process when entering or leaving Costa Rica aim to increase the security controls and speed up the transit of travelers through the terminal, according to the Costa Rican General Directorate of Migration and Foreigners, the new system and process have been in place for a month. The director of Migration affirmed that since the new system was implemented they have regist...

In a video recently uploaded to Facebook, cult leader, Eligio “Nature Boy” Bishop, who has garnered a following of over 42,000 people on Facebook, claims his group of mostly black followers were racially discriminated against by Spirit Airlines who refused to deport the five U.S. citizens last Thursday, October 26, due to their body odor. According to Bishop, things got really real for the cult...

KLM launches its new direct service between San José, Costa Rica and Amsterdam, Holland on Halloween on its Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, an eco-friendly craft. The service will operate Tuesdays and Fridays as of October 31, and then additionally on Sundays starting at the end of January 2018, announced the airline. The new craft consumes 20 percent ​​less fuel that the airline's other jets, gene...

One of Russia's wealthiest individuals had over $20,000 in cash seized yesterday afternoon, Thursday, October 26, 2017, at Costa Rica's main Juan Santamaría International Airport near San José when he was leaving for his home country after a vacation. Andrei Bokarev, 51, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes at $1.69 billion, had arrived in a private jet earlier in the week and participated in a ...

The General Direction of Civil Aviation in Costa Rica invested this year ₵13.6 billion colones, (around US$24 million) in the local or national airports with the hopes of increasing the number of tourists that choose to travel by plane to the different national destinations, the plan is to invest an additional ₵7.2 billion colones in 2018. The funds this year were used in the airports of Coto 4...

Desperate times call for ... desperate packing? Officials with the Costa Rican Drug Control Police (PCD, its initials in Spanish) detained a Costa Rican passenger at the airport with seven packets of cocaine tossed into his carry-on luggage along with his clothes and other everyday personal items, said the Ministry of Public Security. Yesterday, Tuesday, October 10, a 59-year-old man with th...

A terrible smell apparently originating in the air control tower forced Costa Rica's Juan Santamaría International (SJO) airport, west of the capital San José, to close briefly this afternoon, Tuesday, October 10. The country's principal air terminal was paralyzed for approximately 35 minutes due to the unrelenting, and as of yet unidentified, stench. And I thought nothing could top Poás Vol...

Heavy rains this afternoon and evening due to a tropical storm in the Caribbean ocean caused two planes so far to be rerouted from the main Juan Santamaria Airport (SJO) near San José, Costa Rica. Stormy weather today, Wednesday, October 4, caused such low visibility at the Alajuela airport, civil aviation authorities have temporarily closed the airport. The flights were re-routed to the northe...

(Photo Archive, illustration purpose only) The digital migratory system that just this last week replaced the paper forms at the Costa Rica international airports caused long lines during peak hours at the Juan Santamaría Airport, to the point were some of the lines were outside of the building. Apparently, the new control system denominated SIMMEL which is replacing the old landing or TIE ...

Global Entry is a US Customs and Border Protection program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States. This is the program that the Costa Rican-American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM) is trying to implement for Costa Rican tourists when they travel to the United States. Costa Rican tourists experience first-hand the long lines in migrat...

That annoying paper you are always given to fill out while trying to sleep on your flight or bus back to Costa Rica may be a thing of the past. The Costa Rican General Directorate of Migration and Foreigners announced a pilot test of a digital system that will take the place of the paper forms travelers have had to fill out by hand when exiting or entering the country. For the average travel...