The amount of peo­ple get­ting ready to rev­el in To­ba­go Car­ni­val keeps climb­ing with just over two weeks to go.

Ac­cord­ing to To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Chris James, the oc­cu­pan­cy for Car­ni­val is 76 per cent across all ac­com­mo­da­tion types. That fig­ure was as of Wednes­day (Oc­to­ber 12).

James told Guardian Me­dia they are now try­ing their best to fill up the gaps but con­cedes 76 per cent is al­ready a good place to be at.

“Sev­en­ty-six is very good, it’s the high­est for the year,” he said.

He said it could have been high­er but some po­ten­tial vis­i­tors changed plans due to un­avail­able flights for the pe­ri­od.

“If we had flights on the air­bridge ahead of time, I think we could have saved some of these book­ings that we may have lost.”

In terms of what can be done to bring that fig­ure clos­er to 100 per cent in the com­ing weeks, James said, “More flights on the air­bridge a lot of peo­ple pre­fer the flight rather than the fer­ry.”

He said the flight sched­ule needs to go back to what it was pri­or to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, that is 20 flights per day. Ac­cord­ing to James, it cur­rent­ly stands at 12.

Ear­li­er this week, it was re­vealed that Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) had added ad­di­tion­al flights from Oc­to­ber 24 to Oc­to­ber 31 for the Car­ni­val pe­ri­od.

James said they are grate­ful for the in­crease.

He said Trinidad re­mains To­ba­go’s biggest tourism mar­ket, but for Car­ni­val, he has some book­ings from the Unit­ed States and Unit­ed King­dom.

“There is some, it’s not as much as I want­ed but it’s some,” he said.

He is hop­ing word of mouth will as­sist in mar­ket­ing the Car­ni­val for years to come.

James added that they are work­ing with the Tourism Agency and Di­vi­sion of Tourism to get more peo­ple to come in the next two weeks.

“I just hope it’s gonna be a great suc­cess, we’ve got a tremen­dous line-up and every­body is very ex­cit­ed about it,” he said.

To­ba­go’s first Car­ni­val will be held from Oc­to­ber 28-30.