More than 5,000 seats that were made avail­able on the do­mes­tic air­bridge dur­ing the week of Oc­to­ber 24 to Oc­to­ber 31, were not used ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics pro­vid­ed by Caribbean air­lines.

Ac­cord­ing to the na­tion­al car­ri­er it made avail­able dur­ing the week of To­ba­go’s first ever Car­ni­val, 20,108 seats but on­ly car­ried 14,890 pas­sen­gers be­tween the two is­lands.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the air­line op­er­at­ed five in­ter­na­tion­al non-stop flights from Bar­ba­dos, Mi­a­mi and New York with a ca­pac­i­ty of 616 seats to To­ba­go.

The fig­ures come af­ter there were many calls from the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, led by its Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine and pri­vate sec­tor in­ter­est groups, for CAL to put on ad­di­tion­al seats to meet the in­creased de­mand for trav­el be­tween the is­land.

CAL has said on many oc­ca­sions that it los­es mon­ey on each seat if flies be­tween Trinidad and To­ba­go be­cause of the price cap and a sub­sidy that is too low to cov­er the cost of fly­ing pas­sen­gers be­tween the two is­lands.

CAL al­so has com­plained that de­spite noise around a lack of seats, it of­ten flies be­tween the two is­lands and the planes are not ful­ly sub­scribed.

The air­line al­so an­nounced that dur­ing the week it con­duct­ed 286 flights, con­tin­ues to close­ly man­age the air bridge and re­mains com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing con­sis­tent and re­li­able ser­vice through­out its net­work.