To­ba­go mas band­lead­ers are be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly con­cerned that they haven’t heard about mar­ket­ing and oth­er arrange­ments for the up­com­ing To­ba­go Car­ni­val which is just a month away.

Dex­ter Sandy, in­ter­im pres­i­dent of the To­ba­go Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val As­so­ci­a­tion, said mas bands are al­ready ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a de­cline in sales com­pared to 2022 and in­ter­est in the is­land’s Car­ni­val seems to be dwin­dling.

“We’re not hear­ing much. That is lit­er­al­ly the feed­back. A lot of mas bands are get­ting con­cerned that they’re not hear­ing much about the Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val. We re­alise that there’s a de­fi­cien­cy in that area. We re­al­ly need to mar­ket more so we talk­ing about mas bands, I’m talk­ing about pro­mot­ers, To­ba­go Fes­ti­vals Com­mis­sion, all stake­hold­ers, we need to do more in mar­ket­ing the Car­ni­val,” he said.

Sandy said band­lead­ers are al­so hop­ing to hear more about stipends to as­sist strug­gling bands and as the count­down to Car­ni­val be­gins, they are hope­ful that the cur­rent lack­lus­tre par­tic­i­pa­tion will soon see a sig­nif­i­cant turn­around.

“We still don’t have the lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion at this time from mas­quer­aders. There’s in­ter­est but at this stage last year we saw more. A lot of bands have al­ready stat­ed that the sales last year would have been high­er. And I guess that came from last year’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign.

“Ide­al­ly, mar­ket­ing should have start­ed in June, May or June. Ide­al­ly, mar­ket­ing should have start­ed since then but it’s not too late. I wouldn’t say it’s too late. At this point in time, a lot of us have in­vest­ed in­to pro­duc­ing our mas bands and we need to en­sure that these in­vest­ments we are of­fer­ing, we get re­turns.”

Sandy said the band­lead­ers are still op­ti­mistic and are ac­tive­ly seek­ing new strate­gies to boost mas­quer­ad­er par­tic­i­pa­tion.

To­ba­go is ex­pect­ed to host its sec­ond Car­ni­val from Oc­to­ber 27 to 29. The To­ba­go Fes­ti­val Com­mis­sion Lim­it­ed re­leased the Car­ni­val cal­en­dar a few days ago fea­tur­ing events from as ear­ly as Oc­to­ber 13.

The Di­vi­sion of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties and Trans­port has al­ready start­ed dis­cus­sions with po­lice, ho­tel and tourism stake­hold­ers.

Sandy said band­lead­ers are try­ing to iden­ti­fy the rea­sons for an un­ex­pect­ed dip in mas­quer­ad­er en­gage­ment.

“As it is right now, the ma­jor­i­ty of the mem­bers of the as­so­ci­a­tion are not even over ten per cent of the pro­ject­ed head count. Last year, the ma­jor­i­ty of bands would have come in with just about 100 and un­der mas­quer­aders,” he said.

“There were a few that did in ex­cess of 200 mas­quer­aders. As it is now, we have bands re­port­ing they have un­der ten per cent based on last year’s par­tic­i­pa­tion. While we are not see­ing the par­tic­i­pa­tion, we are still hope­ful.”