THA Sec­re­tary of Tourism and Trans­porta­tion Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine says in­creased tourist ar­rivals are ex­pect­ed on the is­land this year.David­son-Ce­les­tine said in an in­ter­view there had been an in­crease of over 60 per cent in book­ings for the year to date when com­pared to the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year.

She said the in­crease was due to the "To­ba­go Go Go" cam­paign which start­ed three years ago to fa­cil­i­tate late win­ter book­ings from vis­i­tors in Scan­di­navia and the Unit­ed King­dom.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said trav­ellers from those mar­kets were be­ing of­fered up to �100 off pack­aged hol­i­days to To­ba­go for at least a sev­en-night stay.

"The di­vi­sion has not been sit­ting down on its hands where tourism is con­cerned and we have been em­ploy­ing quite a num­ber of strate­gies to en­sure that tourist ar­rivals to our shores can be in­creased," David­son-Ce­les­tine said.

An­oth­er ini­tia­tive aimed at pro­mot­ing tourist ar­rivals to the is­land was the "They got to go To­ba­go" road show pro­gramme.She said for some time the di­vi­sion had been look­ing at the Cana­di­an mar­ket and last year mount­ed a col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach with the di­vi­sion of com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment and cul­ture on a To­ba­go pro­mo­tion trip to Cana­da.

She said there would be a fol­low-up trip to that from next Mon­day to Sat­ur­day by tourism stake­hold­ers and en­ter­tain­ers to Toron­to and Ot­tawa to meet with trav­el agents and tour op­er­a­tors to pro­mote the des­ti­na­tion called To­ba­go.

"The ben­e­fits of this will not be felt in the short-term but we ex­pect that in the medi­um and the long-term there will be in­creased tourist ar­rivals to our shores from Cana­da," she added.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said the di­vi­sion was in ne­go­ti­a­tions with a Cana­di­an air­line to op­er­ate a char­ter ser­vice di­rect­ly from Toron­to to be­gin in this year's win­ter sea­son and was al­so in the fi­nal stages of ne­go­ti­at­ing with an Eu­ro­pean air­line to in­tro­duce a once-a-week char­ter ser­vice from Scan­di­navia in the win­ter.

She said the di­vi­sion was al­so in dis­cus­sions with Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) for in­creased ser­vices to To­ba­go over the East­er hol­i­day pe­ri­od and for the To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence from April 20 to 28.

"By the end of the sea­son in April we are ex­pect­ing To­ba­go to re­ceive over 35,000 pas­sen­gers, an in­crease of more than 2,000 over the 2011/2012 sea­son," she said.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said meet­ings had re­sumed with Tourism Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz to set the tone for a very col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach be­tween the Min­istry of Tourism and the Di­vi­sion of Tourism and Trans­porta­tion.

She said at their first meet­ing on Jan­u­ary 30 it was agreed that there would be col­lab­o­ra­tion re­gard­ing the re­pairs and up­grade of the ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port ter­mi­nal which has been an is­sue on the agen­da of the THA as well as the di­vi­sion for some time.

She added that while the min­is­ter was not di­rect­ly re­spon­si­ble for the air­port he had agreed to fol­low it up and get fur­ther in­for­ma­tion to the as­sem­bly with re­gards to not on­ly the re­pairs but al­so the up­grade and ex­ten­sion to the fa­cil­i­ty.

David­son-Ce­les­tine said the dis­cus­sions al­so cov­ered the ho­tel as­sis­tance pro­gramme which was set up to fa­cil­i­tate the up­grade to ho­tels and guest hous­es in To­ba­go. She said over $500 mil­lion had been ap­proved to date but so far the pro­gramme has not been im­ple­ment­ed in a way that To­ba­go hote­liers could ben­e­fit.