HAVANA, Cuba, Mar 18 (ACN) The President of the Cuban Institute of Civil Aeronautics Alfredo Cordero said the US commercial flights to Cuba are behaving as expected.

In a press conference at the Ministry of Transportation, Cordero said the airlines are flying with the frequency it was planned and making adjustments according to the high and low seasons, winter and summer, respectively.

There is a strong competition in the US among the different carriers that were authorized to fly to Cuba and they do reduce or increase the amount of flights based on demand, he said.

The Cuban official used as example American Airlines that has daily flights to Havana and JetBlue with 4 daily flights to different Cuban airports.

He said the amount of travelers from the US continues growing. Havana´s airport saw an increase of 24 percent on passengers, while the country had an 18 percent growth overall.

Recently several media outlets reported that airlines from the US had reduced the amount of flights due to low demand, or had dropped Cuba completely, as Silver Airways and Frontier citing competition.

The Cuban tourism industry has yet to stop its growing trend. In the first two months of 2017, the amount of visitors grew 15 percent compared to the year before, according to Minister of Tourism Manuel Marrero.

But US citizens still have to go through a gruesome license applying process to get a visa to travel to Cuba, and prove the reason they want to come has nothing to do with tourism, thus effectively preventing many of them to visit the island-nation.