HOLLYWOOD, Florida — Increasingly strong leisure demand and a growing recovery of corporate and group business are pushing the Caribbean hospitality industry closer to pre-pandemic performance.
During the Caribbean Hotel & Resort Investment Summit and Hotel Opportunities Latin America conferences, tourism and hotel industry experts laid out the demand and performance trends in the Caribbean, Central America and South America that are giving hoteliers in the regions reason for optimism.
The United Nation’s World Tourism Organization reported the Caribbean is the best-performing region in the world, with 15 million stopover arrivals, 57% of the 26.3 million it received in 2019, said Vanessa Ledesma, acting CEO and director general at the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association. While international arrivals are behind 2019 levels globally, international arrivals to the Caribbean are only at 16% of 2019 levels.
Arrivals to the Caribbean during the first quarter of 2022 outpaced global…