Sixty tourism entities have signed on to participate in this year's staging of the Experience Jamaica Campaign aimed at boosting domestic tourism by offering huge discounts to persons living and working in the island.

Taiwanese passport holders can now enter the British Virgin Islands (BVI) on a visa-free scheme, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last week. The privilege went into effect April 3, according to a recent confirmation of the agreement by the BVI government.

There will be no meaningful growth in the Caribbean tourism market until 2014. That’s the worrying conclusion of KPMG’s annual Caribbean Region Financing Survey unveiled at the recent Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Investment Conference in Puerto Rico.

They came bearing a colorful brochure, new logo and hope that after years of disaster and crisis, Haiti will return to the tourism map. Currently, there are 8,000 hotel rooms in the pipeline. Two are in the Bahamas and two in the Dominican Republic.

Mexico registered record hotel occupancy of 185,550 reserved rooms during the January-April period, up 7.6 percent compared to the same period in 2011, the Tourism Secretariat said. The hotel occupancy figures for the Jan. 1 to April 29 period were obtained from the Data Tur system, the secretariat said.