Adri­an Boodan

A se­nior To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) of­fi­cial be­lieves that ser­vice on the air­bridge be­tween the is­lands is not be­ing ef­fec­tive­ly utilised to pro­mote do­mes­tic tourism. In fact, he is blam­ing Caribbean Air­lines for the prob­lem. Sec­re­tary of Tourism and Trans­porta­tion with the THA, Os­wald Williams, said the air­craft from Caribbean Air­line's Bom­bardier Dash 8 fleet were be­ing tak­en away from air­bridge dur­ing the peak sea­son.

Speak­ing with the Guardian at his Sang­ster Hill of­fice on Sat­ur­day, Williams said, "Peo­ple are un­able to re­ceive book­ings to come to To­ba­go on week­ends, par­tic­u­lar­ly hol­i­day week­ends and when there are events. "So we have that chal­lenge and it ap­pears to us that we have reached that point where there is need for ad­di­tion­al seats, cer­tain­ly on busy oc­ca­sions and those seats are not forth­com­ing," he said. "The present sit­u­a­tion can be man­aged by Caribbean Air­lines if all the equip­ment that they have that is sup­posed to be used on the air­bridge, that is the Dash 8, is used on the air­bridge it can more than man­age the sit­u­a­tion."

Williams said an­oth­er car­ri­er on the air­bridge would not be vi­able. He said Dash 8s were be­ing used to sched­ule flights to Guyana, Suri­name and Bar­ba­dos. "This is tak­ing away from Caribbean Air­lines' abil­i­ty to in­crease the sup­ply to the air­bridge when it is re­quired," he said. Ef­forts to get a re­sponse from Caribbean Air­lines yes­ter­day proved fu­tile. Williams said Vir­gin Air­lines was not pulling out of To­ba­go. He said Vir­gin was plan­ning to take To­ba­go off its Web site be­cause it was not gen­er­at­ing re­turns. Williams said the Web site was re­ceiv­ing a lot of hits on Caribbean des­ti­na­tions.

"In terms of con­vert­ing those in­quiries in­to book­ings to come to To­ba­go, they were do­ing the worst among Caribbean des­ti­na­tions," he said. He said Vir­gin Hol­i­days, the com­pa­ny do­ing the ad­ver­tis­ing, pulled To­ba­go off the Web site be­cause it had to pay for each in­quiry. "It was cost­ing them a lot to leave it on the Web site," he said. Williams said it was too ear­ly to de­ter­mine if the chop­ping of British cou­ple Muri­um and Pe­ter Greene had any sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on the flow of tourists to the is­land. "For the last two weeks or so, ar­rivals out of the Unit­ed King­dom have ac­tu­al­ly shown a bit of an in­crease," he said.

William said there was now a stronger po­lice and army pres­ence in To­ba­go. He said To­ba­go had seen fan­tas­tic growth in lo­cal tourism. Williams said there were com­plaints from peo­ple us­ing the in­ter-is­land fer­ry such as long lines at trav­el agen­cies sell­ing fer­ry tick­ets. Pas­sen­gers had al­so com­plained to the Guardian that the sys­tem to pur­chase same-day tick­ets on­ly at the ports was time-con­sum­ing and sug­gest­ed that the Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T in­sti­tute an on­line book­ing sys­tem sim­i­lar to Caribbean Air­lines.