Photo: ©Simon Dannhauer/123rf Despite daunting challenges presented over the past 18 months by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caribbean tourism and hospitality industry recorded many significant successes, and data points to an encouraging outlook ahead. Speaking during the opening plenary session at the Caribbean Hotel & Resort Investment Summit (CHRIS) held last week, Acting CEO & Director General of the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association (CHTA) Vanessa Ledesma presented insights on the performance and outlook of the Caribbean tourism industry. The pandemic’s impact on the travel and tourism industry globally has been severe, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs worldwide. The World Travel & Tourism Council’s annual Economic Impact Report indicates that the pandemic delivered a blow of $33.9 billion in lost revenue to the Caribbean’s travel and tourism sector, lowering the sector’s contribution to GDP by 58 percent, higher than the global average. Some 680,000 tourism-related jobs [...]