Island hopping Bahamas & Caribbean - advice sought re airlines

[RooFlyer]

I'm looking at an almost spur-of-the-moment trip to Bahamas and a couple of Caribbean islands (ex Nth America); it'll be spur of the moment because of work commitments but outside Nth American school holidays.

I'll be able to fly into and out of say, Nassau or one of the other capitals OK using American or similar, but from there I'd like to fly on to other capitals without booking ahead by more than a day or so. I'm wondering if anyone has experience / can offer any advice on flights between countries in the area?

Looking at Lonely Planet, most of the island based airlines seem somewhat unreliable, schedule wise which might be a problem.

I realise it'll be a case of YYMV, but are any of the island's airlines known to be more or less reliable or reputable? At the moment I'm not wedded to any particular destination, so reliability will be a factor.

 

[ozbeachbabe]

My only flying within the Caribbean has been on Insel Air between Curacao (CUR) & Aruba (AUA) as we had an open jaw itinerary LAS/xMIA/CUR then AUA/xMIA/xLAX/HNL all on AA so needed the above sector to fill in the gap. The cost was approx USD75.00 pp one way which we booked direct on the airline website below.

The photos below are from our flight 7I451 CUR/AUA in November 2013 in a MD-83 that had obviously belonged to Alitalia in a previous life as it still had the insignia on the bulkhead and seat buckle plus all the signage within the aircraft was in Italian and English.

InselAir - Reaching Higher - Fly-InselAir.com

 

[casanovawa]

I've now decided that cruises are probably the best way to get between islands like this, but would be nice to have more than a half day in each location, so might investigate the local airlines sometime...

 

[Happy Dude]

Had some experience with LIAT doing a bit of island hopping in 2012. No dramas re reliability etc IIRC, but I was on no particular schedule and flew at a day or two's notice. More fun, though, was catching ferries.

 

[smit0847]

Man if I had this opportunity I wouldn't be fussed about timings or products etc. I would be going with the flow, looking to see what cheap flights are around and just flying off to random places for the hell of it.

I'd love to visit the Carribean.

 

[RooFlyer]

Man if I had this opportunity I wouldn't be fussed about timings or products etc. I would be going with the flow, looking to see what cheap flights are around and just flying off to random places for the hell of it.

I'd love to visit the Carribean.

I hear what your saying, but I am somewhat unfortunately, a bit of a 'plan ahead' guy in general, and with only a couple of days, I'm trying to optimise my chances of doing what I want to do in limited time and not discover at the airport, say 'oh, we've put that flight off till tomorrow'. I suspect it will be more like you describe, but for now, just researching ...