The Costa Rica Tourism Board and JetBlue celebrated new routes for the North American carrier to Juan Santamaría International Airport (SJO) and Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport (LIR).
Saturday afternoon, a JetBlue flight from Los Angeles arrived in Liberia, Guanacaste, and a plane carrying 112 passengers from the same California city landed at the San José-area airport on Sunday morning. Both aircraft received a traditional water-cannon salute commemorating the new routes connecting Los Angeles and Costa Rica.
“These new JetBlue routes to Daniel Oduber International Airport and Juan Santamaría International Airport are the result of a joint public-private effort to reactivate our tourism industry,” said Gustavo Segura, Minister of Tourism.
Segura indicated that California is one of the United States’s most important tourism markets for Costa Rica.
With the new routes, SJO, Costa Rica’s largest international airport, expects to end 2020 with direct connections to 20 cities across the world.
Meanwhile, JetBlue will fly between Liberia and Los Angeles six times per week during the tourism high season.
Costa Rica fully reopened its air borders to tourists on November 1. It requires that visitors purchase travel health insurance. Tourists do not need to quarantine on arrival or bring proof of a negative coronavirus test.