Above: the British Virgin Islands (CJ Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

After a sluggish start to the year, the Caribbean hotel sector has rebounded of late, with hotel occupancy rising for the fifth consecutive month in October.

The region’s hotel occupancy was 51.2 percent in the typically slow month of September, but that represented a 2.1 percent increase over the same period in 2013, according to the monthly report from hotel analytics firm STR.

It could be a telling statistic for a usually sluggish month; indeed, in September 2013, hotel occupancy actually fell by 0.8 percent over the same period in the previous year.

For the year, hotel occupancy in the region stood at 69 percent for the end of September, up 0.7 percent over the first nine months of 2013.

In September, the average daily rate rose 4 percent to $131.93 and revenue per available room, or RevPAR, rose by 4 percent to $67.53.

STR’s data surveyed 1,861 properties comprising 222,582 rooms.