Eighty-four thousand empty hotel rooms nightly hurting tourism sector – CHTA Director General

The Courtyard Marriott, Barbados

If the Caribbean is truly keen on significantly increasing its earnings from the region’s tourism sector one way of doing so is through the launch of an aggressive marketing initiative that targets the filling of its thousands of hotel rooms that remain vacant every night, Chief Executive Officer and Director General of the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association (CHTA) Frank Comito says.

An estimated 84,000 hotel rooms remain vacant each night in the region and Comito says that filling just ten per cent of these rooms could result in the region’s tourism sector taking in up to US$2 billion  each year. “We have the room capacity across most of our destinations to further increase the economic impact of tourism. Focused efforts by the public and private sectors to fill the large amount of unused room inventory will yield considerable results,” the CHTA Chief Executive says in an article published in the Travel Daily News in Jamaica early in November.

The disclosure comes ahead of the staging of the region’s largest tourism marketing event, Caribbean Travel Marketplace in January.