Short term rentals are surging in popularity. The Caribbean vacation experience has changed noticeably over the last several years.
More travelers are booking apartments near the beach instead of traditional hotel rooms. Families are choosing villas with kitchens and multiple bedrooms. Remote workers are staying longer in residential neighborhoods instead of resort districts. Entire trips are increasingly planned around short-term rental platforms across islands from Barbados to Puerto Rico to Turks and Caicos.
Now, the Caribbean tourism industry is formally acknowledging something that has already become prevalent across the region: short-term rentals are no longer a side category of Caribbean travel.
The Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association has released a new Comprehensive Short-Term Rental Framework designed to help Caribbean governments regulate and integrate the rapidly growing sector into broader tourism strategies.
The initiative reflects a major shift in how the region’s hotel sector is approaching the rise of platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. Instead of opposing the growth of short-term rentals outright, the organization is now pushing for what it describes as balanced regulation aimed at capturing economic benefits while improving oversight and tax collection.
And the numbers behind the trend are becoming difficult for destinations to ignore.
According to the CHTA, one major Caribbean destination saw short-term rental visitor nights grow by 118 percent between 2019 and 2025, with STRs accounting for 39 percent of all visitor accommodation by the first quarter of 2026.
The Caribbean has become one of the strongest global markets for short-term rentals because the product aligns closely with how many travelers now prefer to vacation.
Families traveling together often want kitchens, larger living areas and multiple bedrooms. Longer-stay travelers and remote workers increasingly look for residential-style accommodations with neighborhood access instead of resort compounds. Repeat visitors frequently prioritize local restaurants, walkable communities and more independent travel experiences.
That demand has accelerated throughout the region since the pandemic.
In destinations with limited hotel inventory, short-term rentals have also expanded overall visitor capacity significantly, particularly during peak travel periods when resorts sell out quickly.
The growth has reshaped tourism patterns in places like Puerto Rico, Barbados, The Bahamas, Turks and Caicos and the Dominican Republic, where vacation rentals now represent a major percentage of available accommodation inventory.
For travelers, the shift has created more options. For governments and tourism officials, it has created an entirely new set of regulatory and economic questions.
One of the central issues outlined in the new CHTA framework is taxation.
Without registration systems and stronger oversight, many governments struggle to accurately track short-term rental activity and collect tourism-related taxes tied to the sector.
The association estimates that the accommodation tax gap tied to short-term rentals in the Dominican Republic alone reaches roughly $170 million annually.
That missing data creates broader tourism complications beyond taxes.
Airlines, for example, often use traditional hotel inventory data when evaluating market demand and scheduling flights. When thousands of short-term rental units operate outside official accommodation reporting systems, destinations can appear smaller than they actually are from an airline planning perspective.
That can contribute to seat shortages, higher fares and capacity constraints during peak travel periods.
For destinations heavily dependent on tourism, those gaps can directly affect long-term airlift growth.
