Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

New­ly ap­point­ed To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion (THAT) pres­i­dent Regi­nald Mac Lean is pre­dict­ing a dev­as­tat­ing East­er sea­son for hote­liers on the is­land, with oc­cu­pan­cy strug­gling to reach 50 per cent—the low­est it has been in years.

In a phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Mac Lean said the de­cline start­ed dur­ing the peak sea­son fol­low­ing Gov­ern­ment’s de­c­la­ra­tion of a State of Emer­gency on De­cem­ber 30 last year.

“The sea­son has not been the best sea­son, first­ly, be­cause of the State of Emer­gency,” Mac Lean said.

“What the Gov­ern­ment failed to re­alise when that SoE was put out was that ap­prox­i­mate­ly eight out of ten pas­sen­gers that trav­el out­side of the coun­try take out trav­el in­sur­ance, and trav­el in­sur­ance is not avail­able to peo­ple that are go­ing to a coun­try that has an SoE.”

As a re­sult, he said To­ba­go saw mass can­cel­la­tions, wip­ing out most of the sea­son’s book­ings.

“So, we lost eight out of ten peo­ple. That’s 80 per cent of the pos­si­ble peo­ple book­ing To­ba­go,” he said.

“So we then had a mass of can­cel­la­tions af­ter that, and we were able to con­vince some of them to stay, to show them that the SoE ac­tu­al­ly makes the coun­try safer.”

De­spite some re­cov­ery ef­forts, he said the mo­men­tum nev­er re­turned.

He al­so said an­oth­er is­sue was the To­ba­go Soul and Mu­sic Fes­ti­val be­ing card­ed for the East­er week­end.

“We have an un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion where the mu­sic fes­ti­val is put at the same time as East­er. So those of us on the east­ern end of the is­land are made to suf­fer a bit be­cause now you can’t get flights, you can’t get boat tick­ets—noth­ing,” he said.

He added, “We are prob­a­bly not even go­ing to be 50 per cent full at this point.”

Mac Lean, who is the gen­er­al man­ag­er of Blue Wa­ters Inn in Spey­side, vowed to do his best to lob­by for the needs of the as­so­ci­a­tion.

He said, “We are ac­tu­al­ly go­ing to be go­ing to the Gov­ern­ment and the Op­po­si­tion this com­ing week and telling them that there are cer­tain things that we need,” he said.

“We are the ones on the ground in tourism. We are go­ing to make sure it works, but we have to get the as­sis­tance.”

Last year, THAT vice pres­i­dent Maria Yip-John re­port­ed a de­cline in ho­tel oc­cu­pan­cy rates to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 60 per cent, down from 70 per cent in 2023. She at­trib­uted this de­crease pri­mar­i­ly to the lim­it­ed avail­abil­i­ty of flights to To­ba­go, say­ing many po­ten­tial vis­i­tors were un­able to se­cure trans­porta­tion.