The busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty in To­ba­go says that while the usu­al hype for the long East­er week­end on the is­land has not been as ex­cit­ing as ex­pect­ed, there are still a lot of tourists vis­it­ing.

As a re­sult, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, To­ba­go Di­vi­sion chair­man Cur­tis Williams said busi­ness lead­ers are grate­ful.

He said even af­ter the can­cel­la­tion of the To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence, which was ex­pect­ed to take place be­tween April 18 to 22, lead­ing to a can­cel­la­tion of book­ings, the cham­ber is op­ti­mistic that April will still bring some re­lief to busi­ness­es.

He told Guardian Me­dia, “I am de­fi­ant­ly look­ing for­ward to the re­turns from the East­er sea­son. Half a dozen is bet­ter than none. So, we are quite grate­ful and we look for­ward to the To­ba­go Car­ni­val in Oc­to­ber be­cause we know that will def­i­nite­ly be a bumper time.”

Al­though the cham­ber head did not see an in­flux of vis­i­tors for the East­er sea­son, he said his mem­bers would take ad­van­tage of what­ev­er eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits were avail­able.

Williams said, “I wouldn’t call it loss­es, just op­por­tu­ni­ty. So, you just scale back ac­cord­ing­ly. So, if you were plan­ning to have like 500 and it seems like we’re look­ing at 300 you make the nec­es­sary ad­just­ment. So, it won’t be any loss be­cause you don’t want to put arrange­ments for five and then you get three. Now we have am­ple time to ad­just our fig­ures.

“So far, I’ve seen the air­port is quite busy. I know a lot of folks were try­ing to get across To­ba­go and there have been some chal­lenges with get­ting flights across but Caribbean Air­lines is do­ing their best.”

He said To­ba­go busi­ness­es are now prepar­ing to max­imise the ben­e­fits from ap­proach­ing peak sea­sons.