By: Staff Writer
November 12, 2021
Hotel rates in the Caribbean have remained virtually unchanged in the Caribbean, leading to stronger than anticipated growth coming out of the travel restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. With a target of 30m visitors for 2022/2023, this is good news for resort and property owners.
The Caribbean Hotel Investment Conference & Operations Summit (CHICOS) is being held at the Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar from November 10-12, bringing together investors and financiers as a network and information building exercise for the promotion of hotel and resort development.
Parris Jordan, managing director of HVS, and the chairman and founder of CHICOS, told Caribbean Magazine Plus that he is happy that RevPAR (Revenue per available room) has remained steady in the Caribbean leading to higher earnings for properties around the region.
Calling to mind what happened after the September 11 attacks, the last time of recent memory when global travel came to a near complete stop, hotels had put their room rates to rock bottom levels in an attempt to lure guests back on properties, but that did more damage than good. Because what happened was that rates remained stubbornly low for a longer than normal period and they ended up losing more money and slowing recovery efforts.
Mr Jordan also said: “It’s a very positive thing that they don’t drop the rates, because dropping the rates isn’t going to really fill the hotels more than not. It’s going to create a challenge for them. Because people are not traveling as much because of the issues of getting from one destination to the next, which right now is reducing the restrictions.”
He continued, “Now as it’s becoming easier to travel and by dropping the rate isn’t really going to encourage a tonne of people to come. But if they do come, that’s going to be the rate that they expect going forward. It’s really imperative that hoteliers keep the rates high.”
The Caribbean on average expects upwards of 30m tourists annually, something Mr Jordan feels can be surpassed in the oncoming years by creating more product and encouraging more airlift simultaneously.
He also said: “We’re going to speak about now is the number of people that came to the Caribbean on an annual basis and the source markets because we’ve projected in roughly two years, hopefully, we’ll be back to those regular numbers.
“So in a typical year, there’s roughly 30m visitors that are coming to the Caribbean region, of which 50 percent or 15m of those travellers are coming from the United States, roughly 20 percent of those visitors leaving Europe and another 12 percent or 3.6m from Canada.”
Most of these US visitors, over 6m, come from the Eastern seaboard, which means New York, New Jersey, primarily and then Florida and to some extent the Carolinas.
Mr Jordan also said: “Some of the top destinations according to the WTTC (World Travel & Tourism Council) 2019 was the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas in that order, and they were 22m visitors that spent over $35bn.
While we’re recovering, the Caribbean, the travel and tourism sector is growing at a faster rate than any other regions in the world. Part of that reason, too, is because we’re digging out of a deeper hole. But we’re roughly the contribution for travelling tourism to GDP is almost 50 percent for 2021. Whereas globally it’s going to be a 30 percent increase.
He added: In 2019 the travel tourism contribution to the region’s GDP was $58bn and we see in 2020 is projected to be 24.5m and an additional $13bn in 2021. And all the way up to $51. 5 billion by 2022.”