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Mere days af­ter Sec­re­tary for Youth Em­pow­er­ment and Sport, Keigon De­noon promised more flights would be added to the air­bridge for the up­com­ing hol­i­day pe­ri­od, Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) has con­firmed it in­tends to op­er­ate an ad­di­tion­al 38 re­turn flights be­tween Trinidad & To­ba­go. Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease, be­tween March 27 and April 12, an ad­di­tion­al 2,584 seats will be avail­able on the air­bridge to meet the trav­el de­mand dur­ing the Spir­i­tu­al Shouter Bap­tist Lib­er­a­tion hol­i­day week­end and the East­er peak pe­ri­od.

Dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing ear­li­er this week, De­noon said the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly was seek­ing the use of CAL’s Boe­ing 737 jets for the route. How­ev­er, the air­line clar­i­fied in a state­ment that the ad­di­tion­al ser­vices will be op­er­at­ed by its ATR 72-600 air­craft.

How­ev­er, Regi­nald MacLean, head of the To­ba­go Tourism and Ho­tel As­so­ci­a­tion (TH­TA), told Guardian Me­dia that the an­nounce­ment has come too late. In a tele­phone in­ter­view, he said, "The peo­ple who were com­ing to To­ba­go would have al­ready changed their minds and booked Bar­ba­dos or Grena­da or Mi­a­mi or New York where they could have got­ten flights. It is al­ways done every year too late and it is ter­ri­ble." He lament­ed the lack of plan­ning by of­fi­cials de­spite their know­ing the hol­i­day sched­ules in ad­vance. "It is 50 years now we have been putting up with this rub­bish. They know from year to year when the sea­son is, and how busy it is and they al­ways wait too long. It hurts the ho­tels and re­sorts and guest­hous­es in To­ba­go," he said.