Caracas raid leaves travellers in a bind

Susannah Ray, a teacher at a New York City high school, was supposed to be in class Monday morning, welcoming her photography students back on the first day of the winter quarter.

- GABE CASTRO-ROOT

Her daughter, Bettina, 14, should have been at her own high school to start the second semester of her freshman year.Instead, they waited in Barbados, taking turns on a single laptop to teach and attend their classes after the US military operation Saturday to capture Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, caused widespread flight cancellations in the Caribbean. JetBlue rebooked them, along with Ray's husband, on a flight that departs Jan 11, eight days after they were originally scheduled to return to New York.

Ray, 53, and her family are among the estimated thousands of travellers stuck in the Caribbean for a third straight day since the military operation, during which the Federal Aviation Administration closed parts of Caribbean airspace to US civilian aircraft.

On Sunday and Monday, major airlines were operating extra flights and, in some cases, using larger airplanes to bring back stranded passengers. But the scale of the disruption, which grounded hundreds of flights at the end of the holiday travel season, meant some passengers had to wait days for available seats. Travel insurance was unlikely to reimburse the extra expenses, since most plans exclude coverage for disruptions related to military activity.