In the past month, To­ba­go has lost more than $1 mil­lion from can­cel­la­tions by just one air­line be­cause of the state of emer­gency. To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Tourism and Trans­porta­tion Sec­re­tary Os­wald Williams re­vealed this star­tling fig­ure at the post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing on Wednes­day. "We have nev­er seen this lev­el of can­cel­la­tion in all our deal­ings with Con­dor," Williams said. Pri­or to the state of emer­gency there were very few can­cel­la­tions "a one, maybe two on rare oc­ca­sions, few and far be­tween," the Tourism Sec­re­tary not­ed.

As of Sep­tem­ber 26, book­ings for 112 pas­sen­gers had been can­celled. The Con­dor Air­line flies out of Ger­many to To­ba­go, then to Bar­ba­dos every Mon­day. Williams said on­ly the book­ings to To­ba­go were be­ing can­celled and not those for Bar­ba­dos. Sta­tis­tics from two stud­ies which were re­leased by the Di­vi­sion ear­li­er this year showed that the av­er­age length of stay of a Eu­ro­pean vis­i­tor is ten and a half days and the av­er­age ex­pen­di­ture is US$139. On av­er­age, there are can­cel­la­tions of more than 20 pas­sen­gers per flight. "There is a flight that would have come in­to To­ba­go on Con­dor on Sep­tem­ber 26.

While you had the week be­fore 80 pas­sen­gers booked to To­ba­go the week of Au­gust 29, which is the first re­port we have af­ter the state of emer­gency was de­clared, those book­ings went down to 58," Williams said. He added: "There is one that will come here on 3rd Oc­to­ber. The week be­fore the state of emer­gency was de­clared, 75 pas­sen­gers were al­ready booked on that flight. Two weeks af­ter, 50 pas­sen­gers were booked on that flight. There is a flight that comes in on the 10th Oc­to­ber, there were 72 pas­sen­gers booked on that flight be­fore. Af­ter it went down to 49." He said the sit­u­a­tion is not like­ly to get bet­ter. The state of emer­gency is not sim­ply harm­ful to the 2011 sum­mer sea­son, Williams not­ed, but al­so ad­vance book­ings for win­ter 2012. THA Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don said he found it quite dis­turb­ing that the de­bate in the coun­try at this time was whether the cur­few should re­turn to 9 pm–5 am. He said it should in­stead be on whether the state of emer­gency should be con­tin­ued be­cause the fun­da­men­tal rights of cit­i­zens were be­ing tak­en away.

Lon­don said the emer­gency was hav­ing a "dele­te­ri­ous ef­fect on the To­ba­go econ­o­my and cit­i­zens."

He added: "There are dif­fer­ent things that you can do to send a sig­nal to the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that the sit­u­a­tion in To­ba­go is not a sit­u­a­tion that should in­still fear. "You've got to un­der­stand that a tourist comes here for a pleas­ant and mem­o­rable ex­pe­ri­ence. No vis­i­tor is go­ing to leave his coun­try to come to a place where he be­lieves his safe­ty is go­ing to be jeop­ar­dised." Both Lon­don and Williams not­ed there were oth­er Caribbean na­tions that had more crime than To­ba­go, but were not un­der a state of emer­gency.