Puerto Rico’s largest business group has decided tourism is too important to be left to the tourism industry alone.
The Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce (CCPR) convened more than 50 hoteliers, developers, experience producers, restaurateurs, educators and municipal officials at VIVO Beach Club in Isla Verde last week for the first strategic session of its new Tourism Committee, held in connection with World Tourism Day.
The committee, chaired by CCPR President-elect Mickey Espada and co-chaired by Puerto Rico Hotel & Tourism Association (PRHTA) President and CEO Clarisa Jiménez Mayoral, will act as a permanent private-sector counterpart to government on competitiveness, investment and destination development.
Its first goal is a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Puerto Rico Tourism Company (PRTC) and closer alignment with Discover Puerto Rico, the destination marketing organization.
“For too long we have worked from separate tables. Today we begin building a single table for Puerto Rico tourism,” Espada said, according to the Chamber’s Spanish-language statement.
CCPR President José Julio “Che Julio” Aparicio said tourism will be an institutional priority of the Chamber, a notable shift for the organization.
The industry that quietly passed manufacturing
The timing is not accidental, as the visitor economy has suddenly become one of the island’s primary growth drivers, zooming past its previously supporting role to the likes of manufacturing and other service sectors.
Graphic by Claude AI, directed by Caribbean Business.
Leisure and hospitality employment in Puerto Rico reached 104,800 jobs in August 2026, compared with 81,500 in manufacturing, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank.
The lines first crossed in 2013, briefly reversed during the pandemic, and have since pulled apart to a gap of more than 23,000 jobs. Leisure and hospitality now accounts for 11% of the island’s nonfarm payrolls, against 8.6% for manufacturing. Accommodation and food services alone, at 97,200 jobs, outnumber all factory jobs.
Foundation for Puerto Rico (FPR), whose Visitor Economy Performance (VEP) Model is the most complete attempt yet to size the sector, puts the figure higher still: more than 100,000 direct leisure and hospitality jobs and up to 115,000 once visitor-dependent work in transportation, retail, tours and culture is counted.
FPR, Planning Board, PRTC
The committee inherits three different stories about the same visitors.
At the Isla Verde session, Discover Puerto Rico reported 2025 average daily spending of about $233 per visitor, with 89% intending to return and 92% willing to recommend the island.
The official PRTC and Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics (PRIS) 2024 Visitor Profile, by contrast, reports a daily spend of $96, a figure FPR calls implausible next to comparable destinations such as Hawaii and Cancún.
Graphic by Claude AI, directed by Caribbean Business.
FPR’s model, built on best-global-practice behavioral data and local prices rather than departure-gate counts, puts daily spending at $264 in 2024 and $280 in 2025.
The gap in visitor numbers is wider. The official profile estimated 3.2 million overnight visitors, largely because it classified some 3 million arriving passengers as returning residents. The Planning Board’s balance of payments report counts 980,000 residents traveling abroad and 5.6 million overnight visitors.
FPR, balancing a shrinking and aging population against cheap fares and remote work, estimates 1.4 million returning residents and 5.3 million non-resident overnight visitors in 2024, rising to 5.7 million in 2025.
The official estimate of $2.6 billion in visitor spending in 2024 is considerably less than FPR’s $7.1 billion calculation. Then there’s the industry’s broader economic impact, which adds various elements beyond simply the visitor spend. On that count, Discover’s own study by Tourism Economics pegged total 2024 economic impact at $18 billion, comparable to FPR’s equivalent figure, confirming that the private-sector estimates are converging well above the official ones.
“Our challenge doesn’t end with offering an excellent room; we have to help that guest discover Puerto Rico, receive consistent service and find reasons to come back.”
Yodil Cabán, general manager of the DoubleTree by Hilton San Juan at Gallery Plaza
FPR warns that when official data understates demand, municipalities underbuild, investors hesitate and agencies misallocate. The Planning Board’s latest monthly indicators, reported Sept. 27, show why the stakes are rising. Hotel registrations rose 3.9% from July 2025 to March 2026, with non-residents up 7%. Hotel occupancy climbed from 69.9% to 72.7%, while San Juan cruise passenger movement jumped 45%, and recreation and lodging led all sectors in job growth in July at 4.9%.
Where industry leaders point for growth
At the Chamber gathering, industry leaders pointed to various obstacles that, if removed or improved, would open the floodgates to even faster growth.
Raúl Bustamante, chairman of both Discover Puerto Rico and PRHTA, and general manager of The Royal Sonesta San Juan, listed energy cost and reliability, water infrastructure, permitting, operating costs, certain investment conditions, and an expansion of hotel inventory.
Interlink’s Joval F. Rodríguez Barnés echoed the call for more rooms, while Iván Zavala Steidel of In Realta and Don Rafa Boutique Hotel & Residences in Miramar argued that tourism investment must be aimed toward the revitalization of communities.
“We don’t want to be another committee dedicated exclusively to identifying problems. We want to be part of the solutions.”
Mickey Espada, Chamber of Commerce president elect
“Our challenge doesn’t end with offering an excellent room; we have to help that guest discover Puerto Rico, receive consistent service and find reasons to come back,” said Yodil Cabán, general manager of the DoubleTree by Hilton San Juan at Gallery Plaza.
Matías Fernández, co-owner of VIVO Beach Club and the Hyatt Centric San Juan Isla Verde, put it most compactly: “We have the product; we have to connect it with the tourist.”
Discover’s presentation made the same point with data, showing a heavy concentration of visitors in the San Juan metro region. Jorge Jorge, founder of Toro Verde Adventure Park, and the Díaz family of Carabalí Rainforest Adventure Park, spoke to the power of nature and adventure products to lengthen stays and carry spending into the regions.
Iván Rodríguez Colón, Ponce’s director of tourism, culture and communications, said the goal is not to fragment the Puerto Rico brand but to use regional distinctions to broaden the product and circulate visitor spending across the island.
Representatives of the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón and Universidad Ana G. Méndez called for restoring continuing training for front-line workers.
The committee distilled all of it into six work areas: competitiveness and investment; tourism product development and quality; professionalization and service; regional integration and development; infrastructure, mobility and visitor experience; and public-private collaboration.
“We don’t want to be another committee dedicated exclusively to identifying problems. We want to be part of the solutions,” Espada added.
Spreading the spend beyond San Juan
Those priorities map almost one-to-one onto FPR’s diagnosis. Its conclusion from the VEP data is that growth is arriving faster and stronger than official figures show, and that the metro area cannot absorb it alone.
The urgency now is to build attractions and lodging outside the traditional tourist zones and spread visitor spending across all 78 municipalities.
The economics favor the shift. FPR estimates that about 90% of spending at small local inns, short-term rentals and family visits stays in Puerto Rico, compared with 60% at large hotels and 40% for cruise passengers in transit.
A dollar spent at a family-run guesthouse in Naguabo, that is, does more for the island than one spent at a chain resort.
Graphic by Claude AI, directed by Caribbean Business.
FPR is testing the model in the eastern region, which in 2024 drew more than 2 million visitors and about $1.3 billion in direct spending, roughly 17% of the island’s visitor economy. The effort, backed by House Bill 862 filed in November 2025, would create an Eastern Region Economic Development Council to coordinate mobility and transportation, the management and promotion of natural and cultural attractions, human capital and regional governance.
The pilot links anchors such as El Yunque, the Vieques and Culebra ferries and the former Roosevelt Roads base with the small operators around them, as a template for other regions and a model that, in its own way, has also been pursued by PRTC.
Private-sector convergence
The Chamber, it turns out, is not alone is awakening to this new growth imperative. As Caribbean Business reported Sept. 18, a recent Rebook conference also framed Puerto Rico’s race toward a $14 billion visitor economy as a bet on decentralized industry leadership.
Combined, Rebook, FPR’s regional platform, and the Chamber’s new committee show the private sector moving toward broad-based collaboration in partnership with government authorities.
That fits what CB has called the Integrated Economy policy of the Gov. Jenniffer González administration, treats the visitor economy and manufacturing reshoring, along with other industries, as a complementary diversification of the economy rather than competing bets.
The committee gives that policy something it has lacked on the tourism front: an organized private-sector counterpart with operating knowledge across lodging, attractions, food, education and municipalities.
Aparicio pointed to one near-term test: supporting local sports, culinary, cultural and entertainment entrepreneurs ahead of FITUR 2027 in Madrid, where Puerto Rico will be the partner jurisdiction.
A unified independent-hospitality movement is positioning itself to shape how the island distributes visitation beyond traditional attractions toward island-wide experiences
