Af­ter days of pan­ic among To­ba­go Car­ni­val band­lead­ers who feared los­ing thou­sands of dol­lars in cos­tume de­posits be­cause of lim­it­ed flights, Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine says the flight short­age has been re­solved and more than 3,000 seats have been added to the air­bridge.

Speak­ing to the me­dia on Tues­day af­ter the han­dover of sar­gas­sum clean-up equip­ment at Shaw Park, Au­gus­tine con­firmed that he in­ter­vened di­rect­ly in talks with Caribbean Air­lines (CAL), Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo, and the CAL board to se­cure ad­di­tion­al seats.

He said the new seats were al­ready avail­able on­line for book­ing.

“I must say thanks to Min­is­ter Tan­coo and the board. I did some in­ter­ven­tion on the mat­ter. I think just over 3,000 seats were added, 3,000 plus seats were added,” Au­gus­tine said. “A re­lease will go out lat­er to­day, but the band­lead­ers were able to se­cure the seats for their bands. I think they are now pay­ing for their tick­ets and so on, be­cause there are band­lead­ers that had mas­quer­aders with­out flights to the is­land.”

In re­cent days, sev­er­al band­lead­ers had com­plained pub­licly that mas­quer­aders could not se­cure flights in time for the Oc­to­ber 25–27 To­ba­go Car­ni­val.