Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) has re­port­ed a down­ward trend in book­ings both on ar­rivals and de­par­tures.

Though it’s on­ly been a week and two days since the coun­try’s na­tion­al car­ri­er was able to take to the sky again, CAL’s Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head, Dionne Ligoure, con­firmed the re­duc­tion.

“The book­ings are trend­ing down­ward. We are do­ing what we can to stim­u­late de­mand and to work with the dif­fer­ent mar­kets,” Ligoure dis­closed in a tele­phone in­ter­view.

She how­ev­er ex­plained it did not come as a sur­prise.

“That was ex­pect­ed be­cause when you have some­thing closed for a pe­ri­od of time as was the case with the bor­ders, you would find as I have in­di­cat­ed re­peat­ed­ly, there will be an ini­tial spike in de­mand.”

She con­tin­ued, “And then this is a time of year where there is usu­al­ly a lot of move­ment but even in that re­gard as we had pre­dict­ed in terms of the trend­ing, it’s not trend­ing up and that too is un­der­stand­able. So while there is move­ment for which we are grate­ful, we are still close­ly mon­i­tor­ing the mar­ket.”

When asked what were mea­sures CAL would be tak­ing to stim­u­late de­mand, Ligoure, said due to that in­for­ma­tion be­ing com­pet­i­tive­ly sen­si­tive, she would pre­fer not to dis­close such de­tails at this time.

She said CAL would con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor close­ly book­ings on both ends of the scale—ar­rivals, and de­par­tures. She as­sured all stake­hold­ers con­tin­ue to work to­geth­er to en­sure cus­tomers en­joy a safe and com­fort­able ex­pe­ri­ence.

Since the re­open­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s bor­ders and the re­sump­tion of trav­el, which be­gan on Ju­ly 17, Ligoure said from Ju­ly 17 to Ju­ly 25, the to­tal num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al flights out­bound, was 43 while the to­tal num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al flights in­bound, was 42.

Mean­while, Gen­er­al Man­ag­er at the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (AATT), Hay­den New­ton, said “all is well,” re­gard­ing op­er­a­tions at the Pi­ar­co Air­port in the past week.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with New­ton, he said, “Things have been go­ing quite well in the con­text of every­thing that has been put in place.”

Re­fer­ring to pas­sen­ger feed­back, he de­scribed it as ‘ex­cel­lent,’ stat­ing from all re­ports cus­tomers have been pleased with the ser­vice and safe­ty at the air­port, dur­ing this time.

De­spite re­cent re­ports of some trav­ellers on CAL’s Mi­a­mi flight on Ju­ly 18, hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty com­plet­ing the Trav­el Pass doc­u­ment re­quired un­der the new trav­el pass sys­tem to en­ter T&T, New­ton as­sured the sys­tem in con­junc­tion with the pro­to­cols in place at im­mi­gra­tion and cus­toms points, were “fair­ly ef­fec­tive,” ac­cord­ing to feed­back.

“So far we are sat­is­fied with what has been put in place in Trinidad and To­ba­go is con­sis­tent with the best prac­tices that are oc­cur­ring in oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions, in­clud­ing the Caribbean in terms of the re­open­ing,” said New­ton.