CHTA: 2020 Promises to Be a Great Year Caribbean Travel

Results from the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association's (CHTA) fifth annual Industry Performance and Outlook Study indicated that 2019 was a record year for Average Daily Rate, which was up 5.6% across the region.

According to Gay Nagle Myer’s report posted on Travel Weekly, hotel room inventory was up 2.8% in 2019, to bring total room inventory to 259,538 rooms.

Occupancy, however, was down 2.7%, which Frank Comito, CEO and director general, attributed to the media crisis in the Dominican Republic last summer surrounding the deaths of several tourists, which later were found to be of natural causes, and the impact of Hurricane Dorian in the northern Bahamas last fall.

"Our biggest challenge is to geographically educate people," he was quoted as saying in the Travel Weekly news report. "If a crisis develops in one part of the Caribbean, such as a hurricane, the whole region initially gets blamed."

However, recovery from the major hurricanes in 2017 seems to be steady. Comito said that "Tourism performance and room inventory neared pre-2017 hurricane levels for most of the six major destinations impacted by the 2017 storms."

Overall air arrivals jumped 4.4%; overall, air and cruise arrivals were up 4% in the first nine months of 2019.

The CHTA's overall outlook for 2020 "remains strong," according to the organization. That sentiment was reiterated by Karolin Trobetzkoy, past president of the CHTA and now head of its Education Commission.

"We must keep an eye on climate change and flight shaming," she said. "We must think environmentally and concentrate on zero waste and carbon neutrality."