The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed To­ba­go’s tourism sec­tor, with loss­es go­ing in­to the mil­lions, To­ba­go Tourism Agency CEO Louis Lewis said on Tues­day.

Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence to up­date the is­land on the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s re­sponse to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, Lewis said his agency has start­ed to com­pile da­ta on the eco­nom­ic im­pact the pres­ence of the virus has had and will have on the is­land. He said at the start of 2020, To­ba­go’s tourism ar­rivals saw an in­crease but due to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion the num­bers have sig­nif­i­cant­ly de­creased

“Some of the num­bers are ac­tu­al­ly stag­ger­ing when we look at it, we ex­pe­ri­enced a 21 per cent in­crease in ar­rivals in Jan­u­ary and then came the virus, which start­ed to im­pact on us in Feb­ru­ary and we ac­tu­al­ly saw an 18 per cent de­cline and if you as­sess the dif­fer­ence be­tween an 18 per cent de­cline and a 20 per cent in­crease it’s a sig­nif­i­cant change,” Lewis said.

“It start­ed to af­fect peo­ple’s per­cep­tion of safe­ty for tak­ing va­ca­tions and a lot of our busi­ness is ac­tu­al­ly long haul and it start­ed to im­pact on us, but in March our num­bers are dis­as­trous­ly low as you would ex­pect. So when you quan­ti­fy those met­rics to see what we would have lost in the first quar­ter, which would have been from Jan­u­ary to March, we es­ti­mate our is­land vis­i­tor ex­pen­di­ture, we would have lost $33 mil­lion of busi­ness and that is TT dol­lars com­ing in­to To­ba­go.”

Lewis said the sit­u­a­tion is not like­ly to im­prove for the April to June quar­ter and greater loss­es are pro­ject­ed

“We are pro­ject­ing a loss of about $54 mil­lion and that is first-round ex­pen­di­ture from what we would have gained from vis­i­tors be­ing in To­ba­go, and it gives you a per­spec­tive on the eco­nom­ic im­pli­ca­tions of what we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing it is a very, very dif­fi­cult time.

“With re­gards to the cruise lines, we blocked the re­cep­tion of ves­sels and that caused a $1.5 mil­lion loss of po­ten­tial rev­enue, so you add all of those things to­geth­er be­tween the mid­dle of Feb­ru­ary and go­ing to the end of June, we would have lost about 87 to 88 mil­lion dol­lars worth of busi­ness.”

He said em­ploy­ment would al­so be af­fect­ed, with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,000 peo­ple be­ing dis­placed. How­ev­er, he said ef­forts would be placed on job se­cu­ri­ty and busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity

“We are see­ing a dis­place­ment of about 4,500 per­sons with­in the ac­com­mo­da­tion com­po­nent in the tourism sec­tor and an­oth­er 1,500 peo­ple and in some cas­es, one per­son serves more than one es­tab­lish­ment ... Tak­ing that in­to to­tal, it’s about 6,000 peo­ple who have now moved from full em­ploy­ment to be­ing dis­placed as a re­sult of con­stric­tion. So it’s a very dif­fi­cult one and we have to find ways in which we pro­tect the em­ploy­ment, we move to­wards job se­cu­ri­ty and en­sure there is busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity.”

Lewis said the To­ba­go Tourism Agency is work­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Di­vi­sion of Fi­nance and the Of­fice of the Chief Sec­re­tary so they can pre­pare for when the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic is over.