Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion’s new­ly ap­point­ed pres­i­dent, Regi­nald Mac Lean, is pre­dict­ing an ex­treme­ly dev­as­tat­ing East­er sea­son for hote­liers on the is­land, with oc­cu­pan­cy strug­gling to reach 50 per­cent, the low­est it has been in years.

Mac Lean, in a phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, said the de­cline start­ed dur­ing the peak sea­son fol­low­ing the 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 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 per­cent of the pos­si­ble peo­ple book­ing To­ba­go,” he ex­plained. “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 point­ed to sched­ul­ing con­flicts as an­oth­er ma­jor is­sue. This year, the To­ba­go Soul and Mu­sic Fes­ti­val is set for the same week­end as East­er.

“As for East­er com­ing up, we have an un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion where 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 per­cent 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 these are cer­tain things that we need. We are the ones on the ground in tourism.

We are go­ing to make sure it works, but we have to get the as­sis­tance.”