Photo: Jorg Stober/123rf

The latest economic data indicates that travel in the U.S. has a long way to come back from the coronavirus crisis: weekly travel spending in the U.S. has fallen 85 percent from the same point a year ago, according to figures prepared for U.S. Travel by the analytics firm Tourism Economics.

That puts the economy squarely on pace to lose 5.9 million travel-related jobs by the end of April, as had been predicted earlier—more than a third of the travel-supported workforce.

The tourism fallout is clear in Puerto Rico, with hotels operating with single-digit occupancy rates, while many airlines have severely cut their operations around the world, including to the Caribbean.

In Puerto Rico, tourism and its related sectors, are an important part of the local economy. In fact, tourism is the second largest export sector of the local economy after manufacturing.